Abstract
Does cultural evolution happen by a process of copying or replication? And how exactly does cultural transmission compare with that paradigmatic case of replication, the copying of DNA in living cells? Theorists of cultural evolution are divided on these issues. The most important objection to the replication model has been leveled by Dan Sperber and his colleagues. Cultural transmission, they argue, is almost always reconstructive and transformative, while strict ‘replication’ can be seen as a rare limiting case at most. By means of some thought experiments and intuition pumps, I clear up some confusion about what qualifies as ‘replication’. I propose a distinction between evocation and extraction of cultural information, applying these concepts at different levels of resolution. I defend a purely abstract and information-theoretical definition of replication, while rejecting more material conceptions. In the end, even after taking Sperber’s valuable and important points on board, the notion of cultural replication remains a valid and useful one. This is fortunate, because we need it for certain explanatory projects (e.g., understanding cumulative cultural adaptations).
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Notes
As I will discuss later on, however, the joke already appears in a 1958 satirical novel by Peter de Vries.
They don’t need to be memorized: We could imagine that all the mathematicians have been given a sheet of paper with numbered jokes, and that they are just looking up the jokes in the list.
The mathematical theory of information expressly leaves out any mention of semantics, because, according to Shannon, this was “irrelevant to the engineering problem”. Shannon’s definition is a way to measure the amount of information, but it tells us nothing about what this information is about. It is unclear exactly how the mathematical definition relates to our everyday understanding of (semantic) information (Wilkins and Hull 2001; Dennett 2017, chapter 6), and this remains an outstanding problem in the philosophy of information. For a recent ambitious attempt to bridge the gap from mathematics to semantics, see Haig (2017).
If Lewens wants to maintain this relaxed notion of “replication” throughout, however, it is hard to see why he still dismisses memes, which clearly fulfill his definition. A meme gets ‘replicated’ when it is causally responsible for the occurrence of another cultural representation that is sufficiently similar to be treated as an instantiation of the same ‘meme’.
Defined in this way, “evocation” should be distinguished from Tooby and Cosmides’ concept of “evoked culture” (Tooby and Cosmides 1994), which more narrowly refers to the role of innate cognitive mechanisms in bringing about cultural representations. My concept of “evocation” is broader. As the example of the mathematicians shows, information that is “evoked” need not be innate. It is possible that it was simply acquired or transmitted at an earlier point.
Consistent with his more material approach, Morin has also rejected the “reduction of genes to information” (personal communication, 2017). If genes are mere information, asks Morin, does it follow that we can send our genome through the internet? Yes. According to a strictly informational conception, “genes” can indeed be saved on a flash disk or e-mailed (see Dennett 2011). For Morin, this is a reductio ad absurdum of the strictly informational point of view, but I in fact welcome the conclusion. The informational view also works both ways: Researchers have recently succeeded in encoding a digitized video clip into the DNA of a bacterium (Shipman et al. 2017).
See www.aristocratsjokes.com for a list of renditions and versions. The Wikipedia entry about “The Aristocrats” provides the abstract template of the joke (the “meme”), which consists only of three basic elements (Legman 2007). Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this reference.
It has been argued that chain letters did not become truly epidemic until the invention of carbon paper. Memes ride piggyback on available technologies.
The analogy between manuscript copying and DNA replication is so close that programs for analysing phylogenetic inference have now been used to uncover the relationships between medieval manuscripts (Howe et al. 2001).
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Acknowledgements
This paper has benefited from long discussions with several scholars of cultural evolution. I wish to thank Olivier Morin, Dan Sperber, Dan Dennett, Mathieu Charbonneau, Alberto Acerbi, Nicholas Claidière, Helena Miton, Stefaan Blancke, and Thom Scott-Phillips for all their constructive feedback and critical objections. I also wish to thank two anonymous reviewers, as well as Maureen O’Malley, for their excellent suggestions to help improve this paper, and Nick Brown for proof-reading the manuscript.
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Boudry, M. Replicate after reading: on the extraction and evocation of cultural information. Biol Philos 33, 27 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-018-9637-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-018-9637-z