Does Evolution Act Upon Ideas?
Offline Ever since Richard Dawkins' coined the term "meme," there has been a high degree of controversy as to whether or not ideas are the subject to evolutionary processes. My conjecture, is that sometimes they are, and sometimes they are not. First, let's get conceptually clear as to what evolution actually is. Evolution, simply put, is decent with modification...we all know this. The main mechanisms in evolution, is natural selection: Those traits most adapted to a given enviornment will most likely pass on their information. Once again, we all know this.
Now, Gould has argued against Dawkins, Dennett, and Maynard Smith, saying that ideas are Lamarcian, and by no means random. Evolution demands a blind random mutations in order for evolutionary processes to act upon such mutations. I have two points of contention: (1) Not all ideas enter the mind and get passed on due to our own volition, and (2) some inherent mental structures fit the requirements for evolutionary processes to act upon them.
Lets start with (2). One obvious mental structure is the language module. Except for the rules of Universal Grammar, specific natural languages are not passed on genetically. It is clear that languages evolve. The clearest example is the Romantic languages. Italian, Spanish and French all have a common ancestor: Latin. We know this due to the work of historical linguistics. Italian, Spanish and French all share many morphological, syntactic, and phonemic traits. The change happened randomly. The memetic change within latin was slow and gradual. It wasn't like a group of latin speakers woke up and said "today, we are going to invent french." changes within language don't work that way. In all probability, the change occured when a child was learning latin, and pronounced something differently. Slowly, over thousands of years (perhaps hundreds...not good with dates), these changes added up, and gave us french.
Lets move on two (1). As far as I know, these two examples are exclusively mine. Ever had a song stuck in your head that you couldn't get out? Now, if (1) is true, this phenomenon ought not happen. However, it clearly happens. If I completely control my thoughts, then it follows with necessity, that I should be able to stop thinking about an annoying song. The other example has to do with beliefs in general*. Can I really force myself to believe something I know to be false? Could I honestly believe that 2 + 2 = 5? Or that this is a valid inference rule: P --> Q, Q, Therefore, P? It doesn't seem like it. It seems like some ideas, like mathematical ideas, have a high degree of evolutionary fitness.
I have argued that Gould is wrong, at least some of the time. Is he also correct? Are all ideas subject to evolutionary processes? It seems that any idea in which one can consciously choose not spead would be a candidate of something not subject to natural selection. Any idea that was intentionally fashioned, may be a case of artificial selection, but not natural selection.
*I am assuming doxastic volunterisim is false
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I am by no means an expert in evolutionary theory, so any comments would be greatly appreciated.
"In the high school halls, in the shopping malls, conform or be cast out" ~ Rush, from Subdivisions
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If certain ideas enhance survival and are passed to subsequent generations, could there be a feed back loop betwen the ideas and specific brain structures that are able to comprehend the ideas? So the proto-human that figured out how to tie a stone on a stick may have tried to pass that information on, but only those with similar brain capacity to understand and apply what he did would receive the benefit of the idea, gaining advantage over those that had less efficient clubs.
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Wavefreak, the whole point in ideas is that they aren't genetic.
I believe that the genetic evolution in humans over the last 10000 years has been minimal as natural selection hasn't really played on genetic features so much as cultural ones.
If, through some weird event, all the people over the age of 5 were wiped out, so much would be lost as much of what we have is passed down culturally rather than genetically. I could take a child of any race or nationality and raise them to be English in all but blood, and they would be recognised as English.
In genetics, a gene survives by producing offspring to carry on the genes. An idea survives in a similar way by being passed on, and therefore depends on being valued in some way. Perhaps the agent believes it, perhaps they just find it amusing, but so long as they pass it on to someone who remembers it, the idea will survive.
As I understand it, Chaoslord was bring up the question whether idea evolution can be modelled Darwinian and gave examples of atleast some cases where it can.
Out of interest, what would a Lamarkian alternative imply?
Didn't Lamark claim that we lost out tails because we found them unnecessary? I think that this style of evolution could be applied to ideas as ideas do depend on our active use of them. The most damning thing to an idea is to be found irrelevent as no one sees a need to remember it anymore.
I guess I'm thinking that if ideas are nothing more than states in our brain (materilaism again) then there is a correlation between ideas and ohysical structures. While the idea itself is not genetically based, the structure to support that idea is. So the idea to make a club with a stone tied to it requires a physical structure to support that idea. And that idea can't be passed to a subsequent generation unless the decendents inherit the physical structure to support the idea. So the presence of the structure that supports the idea give a selection advantage.
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