************************************************************
This is Thought Contagion News (formerly Mnemon), Aaron Lynch’s occasional newsletter of thought contagion theory (the evolutionary epidemiology of ideas). If you do not wish to receive this newsletter, simply send a return message with the word "unsubscribe" on the first line. To subscribe or resubscribe, send a message with the words "subscribe" in the subject line to aaron@mcs.net. If you use an email alias and wish to unsubscribe, please include a copy of the routing details (full header).
************************************************************

Topics in this issue:


Toward more self-explanatory terminology

Behavioral finance and stock market thought contagions

A pioneering evolutionary cultural replicator work by F. T. Cloak now
online

The changing meaning of the word meme -- and doing without it

Update on Evolution of Intelligence Chapter




                    Toward more self-explanatory terminology

        As the title change for this newsletter suggests, the experience of recent years has shown the value of unambiguous and self-explanatory terminology. Thus, the term “mnemon,” which may hold some value in technical discussions, may not be so well-suited for use as a newsletter title. Likewise, the word “meme,” used often in previous newsletter issues, is being used much less often in favor of more self-explanatory terms.

        To help provide self-explanatory language in both general interest and technical works, I am pressing the term “thought contagion” into service with both a definition 1 and a definition 2. In definition 1 (non-technical), a thought contagion is just a self-propagating idea, as explained on page 2 of the book Thought Contagion. In definition 2, a broader technical definition is given, such that a thought contagion is a memory item, or portion of an organism’s neurally-stored information, whose instantiation depended critically upon prior instantiation of the same memory item in one or more other organisms’ nervous systems. (The latter definition is best understood in context of reading one of the recent academic or technical papers, which explain some of the definitional issues involved.)



                    Behavioral finance and stock market thought contagions

        Last year’s issue mentioned that there was an article called “Thought Contagions In the Stock Market” forthcoming that year in the Journal of Psychology and Financial Markets. The Journal’s publication ran a bit late, so the article was not published until March 24, 2000. I also presented the article during a talk for the December, 1999 meeting of the Institute for Psychology and Financial Markets held at the Aspen Institute in Aspen, Colorado. Among the topics discussed in the article was the market phenomenon known as the Internet bubble. After explaining some possible thought contagion factors contributing to the bubble, the article argued that the bubble was likely to deflate or burst. So its publication shortly before the major April decline in Internet shares proved timely for financial readers. The article and its sequels have generated interest in both the financial press and financial institutions.

        Although I published a short discussion of market rumors as part of a 1997 article, I began an expanded investigation of stock market phenomena amid the skyrocketing Internet shares of Spring, 1998. The work has since extended into many other aspects of financial mass psychology with a growing backlog of unpublished material. It turns out to be a surprisingly rich area of application for thought contagion theory, but is much more complex and intellectually demanding than previous applications I have studied. Note that this financial work, in particular, favors clear, unambiguous, and self-explanatory language.



                    A pioneering evolutionary cultural replicator work
                    by F. T. Cloak now on-line

        Thought contagion theory may be viewed as being at least a branch or incarnation of evolutionary cultural replicator theory, or even synonymous with it in technical terms. Yet contrary to common belief, evolutionary cultural replicator theory was not invented by Richard Dawkins, but goes back at least to the cultural anthropologist F. T. Cloak, who discussed it in his 1973 paper "Elementary Self-Replicating Instructions and Their Works: Toward a Radical Reconstruction of General Anthropology Through a General Theory of Natural Selection" presented at the Ninth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. (In Cloak's very broad usage, genes also count as "instructions," hence the generality of the theory of natural selection presented in that paper.) The idea of Dawkins as originator of evolutionary cultural replicator theory has become so widespread and often communicated (due to Dawkins's popular writing style, ongoing publicity, etc., and Cloak's technical style, obscure modes of publication, and lack of self-promotion) that even people who have read Cloak's early papers and forgotten their publication dates can acquire the idea of crediting the theory's origin to Dawkins.

        Cloak, who was never a popularizer, was praised by former American Psychological Association president Donald Campbell as "...one of the most meticulous and creative thinkers about social evolution..." (American Psychologist 31, p. 381, 1976). A 1975 paper by Cloak titled "Is a Cultural Ethology Possible" [Human Ecology 3(3): 161-182] that goes into less detail than the 1973 paper has been more widely cited--partly because of where it was published but perhaps also because a 1968 version by the same title was published in Research Reviews 15(1): 37-47. To make the 1973 paper more easily available to scientists and scholars, a scanned version  <http://www.thoughtcontagion.com/cloak1973.htm> (3.4 megabytes total) is now online with permission from the author. The 1975 paper, which was cited by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976), does discuss the self-replication and natural selection of brain-stored cultural items, as well as elementary self-replicating instructions in general. But it does not handle these subjects as formally and symbolically as the 1973 paper. Instead, Cloak's 1975 paper refers readers to the 1973 paper for elaboration of the theory. Both works follow the cultural microevolution studies Cloak conducted in a village of Trinidad during 1963 to 1965 that were the basis of his 1966 Ph.D dissertation, and clearly were not products of "armchair theorizing." Early discussion of provisionally proposed "units of cultural instruction" and their self-propagating effects also appears in Cloak's short 1966 paper "Cultural Microevolution," [Research Previews 13: (2) p. 7-10.]

        The scanned version now online is from the copy that F. T. Cloak sent to me in 1979, after I made a personal request for it. (I was unable to locate a library copy.) Yet my early reading of that paper was intended to find out how much of the work I was doing as an undergraduate may have been reinvention of earlier work. I was not particularly concerned with which papers and book chapters of the early to mid 1970s preceded the others. So, by the time I began publishing in the 1990s, I had forgotten that Cloak’s more elaborated paper actually preceded by a few years the more modest paper in which he asks whether a cultural ethology is possible. A recent and more mature re-reading of those papers reminded me that Cloak’s 1973 paper preceded his often-cited 1975 paper, and that it was published well in advance of Dawkin’s book The Selfish Gene. It contains key ideas that later appear in The Selfish Gene, such as the evolution toward systems of mutually-supporting cultural replicators (and replicators in general.)

        My own work on the evolutionary epidemiology of ideas falls within the scope of evolutionary cultural replicator theory. It can be seen as further development of certain aspects of Cloak's work with a mixture of reinvention and new aspects added. The examples focus on cases where evolutionary replicator analysis offers distinct new insights for large societies -- often emphasizing practical matters. It does not, however, offer to explain all social or cultural phenomena nor even all cultural evolution and transmission phenomena.

        One of the approaches that Cloak and I share in common is one that I did not fully appreciate back in 1979: the use of the evolutionary micro-event concept and diagrams of those events. By 1979, I had completed two internships in a high-energy physics laboratory and taken many physics courses as well as chemistry and physical chemistry. This background led me to take idea of events and event diagrams for granted back then. In my own thinking, I was using simpler event diagrams that emphasized the (usually incremental) host population changes that an event produced. Cloak had earlier developed a system of event diagrams that emphasized the causal details for each event more than the host population increments and decrements the event produced for each of its participating forms. Having read much more literature in the social sciences by now, I appreciate the pioneering nature of Cloak’s work with evolutionary micro-events and event diagrams in anthropology.

        We should note that Cloak did not use the term “evolutionary cultural replicator theory” in his 1973 paper, but instead called it “instruction theory.” Unfortunately, “instruction theory” is another example of non-self-explanatory terminology. People hearing it can easily assume that it refers to some kind of educational model, for example. This may have reduced the idea’s ability to spread even among people who were looking for technical works on evolutionary cultural replicator theory. Cloak seems to have spent more time working on the theory itself than in getting it promulgated.

        The word "replicator" was not invented by either F. T. Cloak or Richard Dawkins. It is documented in the Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, as going back to the early 1960s in connection with biology and the more general meaning of "that which replicates." If Cloak had not given such a central role to the word “instruction” with its unusual (technical) definition, but instead referred in a more self-explanatory manner to elementary self-replicators, we may speculate in hindsight that his 1973 paper could have been more widely read and understood.

        F. T. Cloak spent years developing the theoretical framework that he published in 1973. However, the message that an academic and scientific discipline needs to be radically restructured is not always welcomed by practitioners. This probably contributed to Cloak’s eventual denial of tenure -- although colleagues might reasonably be expected to find fault with the paper’s proposal to explain “all known biological, social, and cultural phenomena” in terms of self-replicating instructions. Cloak probably heard an earful about this, and even I would conclude that he overstated his case. (Much of my own effort may be seen as demonstrating that one does not need to overstate the case in order to find worthwhile lines of inquiry and interesting applications of the theory.) Yet Cloak’s 1975 cultural ethology paper seems to have overreacted in the opposite direction of modestly posing a question -- especially in the title. Because the latter paper was more widely cited and available in the past 25 years, many people did not learn how far Cloak’s evolutionary cultural replicator work had gone during the early 1970s.

        Cloak’s denial of tenure may have helped keep some of his works in obscurity for many years. It also had some influence on my own considerations of going into social science graduate work. I had finished most of my undergraduate physics and mathematics requirements early, and had started taking social science courses, including anthropology. Yet the possibility of having a career ended due to the unpopularity of a relatively new theoretical framework among proponents of more established frameworks helped tip the balance in favor of a decision to do the evolutionary thought contagion work independently. I also had the offer of a post-college position at the Fermilab, which I did not have in any social science field.

                    The changing meaning of the word meme -- and doing without it

        While Dawkins did not originate evolutionary replicator theory or the word "replicator," he did originate the word "meme" with this particular English spelling and gave some examples in his 13-page chapter "Memes: The New Replicators." That, however, does not mean that Dawkins should be credited with Cloak's evolutionary cultural replicator work any more than the originator of the word "gene" (Johannsen) should be credited with launching Mendelian genetics. Unfortunately, Dawkins did not give the word "meme" a formal definition in 1976, leading to a profusion of definitions being made by people trying to fill the void. Dawkins did clarify in his 1982 book The Extended Phenotype (W. H. Freeman and Company) that "a meme should be regarded as a unit of information residing in a brain (Cloak's 'i-culture')" [p. 109], but this may have conveyed the impression of an Oxford professor fumbling for a definition and thus needing more help in the form of additional proposed definitions--adding to the profusion of definitions.

        In recent works, Dawkins has strongly promoted philosopher Daniel Dennett, who uses a far less specific definition of meme--while neither of them even mention Cloak in connection with memes or evolutionary cultural replication. Writing in his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Simon and Schuster, 1995), Dennett treats meme theory as merely a perspective (as distinct from a scientific hypothesis or theoretical framework), and expresses doubts for the prospects that it might become a rigorous science. Dennett sums up the perspective he calls "the meme perspective" with the slogan: "A scholar is just a library's way of making another library." This slogan, the expression of meme theory as a perspective, and much other material were also used in an October 27, 1989 lecture called "Memes and the Exploitation of the Imagination," republished in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48:2, Spring 1990, p. 127-135. That journal may have been a good place for reviewing aesthetic or artistic perspectives, but was not a peer-reviewed science journal whose reviewers could be expected to have read basic works on evolutionary cultural replicator theory. While the slogan expresses the inverted and counter-intuitive thinking that often arises in evolutionary cultural replicator theory, it departs radically from the clarification of the term "meme" given by Dawkins in 1982. Dennett also treats artifacts such as spoked wheels as being or containing memes. In going along with this usage and publicly endorsing it, Dawkins implicitly abandons his 1982 definition in favor of a far less specific and more ambiguous definition for which the prospects of rigorous science may indeed be doubtful. A pithy slogan thus seems to have played a larger role in the definition change than any theoretical or empirical developments of science. In contrast Dawkins, whose professional interests lie more heavily in genetics, has not promoted any work that treats genetics as a mere perspective. For instance, it seems unlikely that he would endorse a change of definition for the word gene even if someone popularized the provocative slogan, "An amino acid is just a prion's way of making another prion."

        As a reader of draft chapters from Dennett's 1995 book, Dawkins might have persuaded Dennett to recognize Cloak as originator and elaborator of evolutionary cultural replicator theory, but apparently he did not. The writing style and non-mention of Cloak's 1973 paper by Dawkins's 1976 book can easily give readers the impression that the theory was invented along with the word by Dawkins, although Dawkins did say in his 1982 book that he did not know the human culture literature well enough to authoritatively contribute to it (p. 112). Fortunately, the authoritative contribution of the theory by Cloak did in fact come from a human culture specialist: a cultural anthropologist. In both his 1989 lecture and his 1995 book, Dennett includes a paragraph (1995, p. 361) indicating that Dawkins was describing the "extension of classical Darwinian theory" (to cultural replicators) as "his" [Dawkins's] innovation -- even though Dawkins cites Cloak's 1975 paper, which in turn refers readers to Cloak's more technical 1973 paper for elaboration of the theory. Misattribution of the theory to Dawkins, along with Dawkins's subsequent promotion and endorsement of works containing that misattribution, have helped to widely disseminate the misattribution. Having Dawkins incorrectly credited with launching evolutionary cultural replicator theory may have vastly increased the weight given to his implied approval of a nonscientifically-based and drastic change in the definition of the word "meme." It may also have fostered a wide misconception that evolutionary cultural replicator theory sprang from "offhand remarks" appended to a work of genetics popularization rather than from more serious and dedicated efforts.

        In 1997, The Oxford English Dictionary apparently took note of both the early profusion of definitions and the recent shifting of definitions to come up with a very broad definition for meme. By that usage, some thought contagions are "memes," some thought contagions are not memes; some "memes" are thought contagions, and some "memes" are not thought contagions.
 With sharp differences between different dictionaries and among "memeticists," meme has gone from its early specificity to a word looking for a definition--and a retinue of derivatives that seem to have been created largely because they could be created. (Part of that retinue of derivatives occurs in an Internet-circulated document called “Memetic Lexicon” by Glenn Grant, that falsely attributes a meme definition to “Wheelis, quoted in Hofstadter” without listing any specific references. The misattribution of key definitions to quotations by an authority figure may be part of what causes the “Lexicon” and its words to spread, even in some academic circles.)

        Although the word meme was coined to popularize a specific theoretical paradigm, that fact seems to have been forgotten as people eventually began devising theoretical paradigms to go with the word rather than words to go with their theoretical paradigms--perhaps due to the word's versatility and popularity. (Word versatility and popularity are, of course, not scientific criteria for forming and testing theoretical frameworks.) This situation may give the false impression that the word and its similarity to the word gene were the impetus for the original theoretical paradigm. It also creates a state of academic, scientific, and terminological gridlock that may impede application of the original theoretical framework, thus serving various interest groups including those who want only alternative theoretical frameworks (strict sociobiology, hard-line behaviorism, etc.) to be used. Although Cloak’s 1975 paper subdivided the realm of “culture” into “i-culture” and “m-culture” to avoid the traditional ambiguity of the word culture, the word meme may now occupy a position of even greater ambiguity.
 
        These difficulties again favor the use of comparatively specific, self-explanatory, and unequivocal terms such as "idea," "belief," "behavior," "artifact," "thought contagion," "doctrine," "opinion," "belief system," "urban legend," and so forth--some of which are widely accepted without the versatility of a monosyllable. The difficulties with meme starting in the 1990s call for new caution against confusing Cloak’s work or my own work with various theories of memes. Accordingly, some very recent works avoid the confusion by not even using the word meme -- except in reference to literature that does use the word. However, the ambiguity of a word with many definitions swirling around it can actually increase its popular propagation, even as some scientists recoil from it. When people are able to read into a word the meaning that most suits them, it may increase the number of non-specialists adopting and using the term.
 
        Evolutionary cultural replicator theory is a mode of causal analysis rather than a perspective. Specifically, it is the analysis of recursive chains of causation in which differences in the rates (of recursion or iteration) for communication and retention events are analyzed for their cumulative effects over many iterations at the level of a whole society. The theoretical framework does not refer to any "replicator's eye view," to "selfishness" of replicators, or require that replicators be viewed as life forms. While these concepts may serve as pedagogic devices in non-technical writing and popularization, (or even some technical works), they are not necessary parts of the theoretical framework. The theory also does not require inherently discrete "units," "components," or "particles" of culture, but allows for "units" as definable as a meter, an inch, etc are in the measurement of distance. Some of my recent work (e.g., 1998) can explain in mathematical language why cultural items that seem "smallish" may be more useful in the analysis even though absolute metrics for the "size" of an idea, etc. are not defined. The theoretical framework also explains how the spread or decline of existing varieties can cause the arrival or extinction of new forms and combinations of ideas, beliefs, etc.

        Although Dawkins’s 1976 book did not claim that Dawkins invented evolutionary cultural replicator theory, the book did provide a number of interesting examples. Cloak’s 1973 paper, on the other hand, did not make much use of concrete examples to help transmit his ideas. Instead, Cloak published his more concrete works in separate papers -- possibly making it harder for readers to understand the theory. For his part, Dennett made important applications in understanding evolutionary cultural replicators as forces shaping the development of the human mind, even if he erred in construing the theory as a perspective.



                    Update on Evolution of Intelligence Chapter

        The last newsletter mentioned a chapter forthcoming in The Evolution of Intelligence, edited by Yale University psychologists Robert J. Sternberg and James C. Kaufman. The title given last year has now been simplified to “Evolutionary Contagion in Mental Software.” (Its working title had been “The Memetic Mind: Natural Selection in Mental Software. Topics include astrological dating, belief in psychic powers, popularity of the hypothesis that women have an innate partner wealth preference, the rise of Nazism and neo-Nazism, US slavery and racism, the belief in corporal punishment of children, the role of accelerating evolution in rising IQ test averages, the possible (ironic) effect of neo-Nazi and other racist ideologies in diminishing genetic and environmental components of individual and population intelligence, and the evolution of intelligence in the presence of mind-enhancing technologies. The book is due in early 2001 from Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, which has now given it a web page. (Actual price and updated chapter title are not yet listed.) The other contributors are R. J. Sternberg, J. B. Grossman, J. C. Kaufman, D. F. Bjorklund, K. Kipp, J. L. Bradshaw, R. L. Byrne, W. H. Calvin, M. C. Corballis, L. Cosmides, J. Tooby, O. Flanagan, V. Hardcastle, E. Nahmias, P. Godfrey-Smith, H. Jerison, I. M. Pepperberg, H. Plotkin, P. Bloom.




Feel free to forward this issue of Thought Contagion News to any friends and forums who would appreciate it!

Aaron Lynch

aaron@thoughtcontagion.com

The Thought Contagion Science Page:
http://www.thoughtcontagion.com





-- Anonymous, December 06, 2000

Answers

If you actually read all of the above, sign in below.

I'm curious.

-- Anonymous, December 07, 2000

um, no, but IF I scanned on by and found you, well um, do I get *ANY* points?

hee hee, shoot I dont even know what any of it said.

um, sign with an x.

-- Anonymous, December 08, 2000

Ah, does it count if you read it, say, over a year ago?

:-)

-- Anonymous, December 08, 2000