When I started this blog I knew from the off that it was really aimed at an audience of one. There was never any intention to garner a wider audience than myself and a few polite friends. After all, why would anyone really be bothered what I think when they've got so much to think about for themselves.
A few years ago I found myself interested in the broad concept of memes. The two best books I read on the topic were Susan Blackmore's "The Meme Machine" (1999) and the more recent "On the Origin of Tepees" (2012) by Jonnie Hughes (note the punning title). Both of them seemed to demonstrate to me that cultural evolution can be described in similar ways to genetic evolution. That all an idea has to do to succeed is to get passed on. It certainly doesn't have to be true. My son, a social anthropologist, doubts the utility of this particular idea, looks disdainfully at me when I mention it, and so it's a subject that we now tend to avoid ..... But, after reading Hughes's book I was still left with one mystery "what's the genetic advantage in wanting to pass on cultural memes?" Why do we have the urge to tell each other stuff? Is it the loudmouth that gets the girl?
Being the sort of person who's attracted to science precisely because it allows you to say you don't know I don't feel any obligation to come up with a metaphysical answer. One day an answer will occur to me, and then I'll check it out and no doubt find out that someone else has come up with it already, but until then I'm not unhappy not to know.. Answers on a post card please.
Meanwhile, here's a picture of a dog swimming in the River Itchen near Winchester.
n.b. while its been well proven that students who do actually put pen to paper remember more of what they've written than when they bash away at a keyboard, this post's title really ought to be "Putting fingerprints on the keyboard". When nobody remembers what a pen is will we still talk about putting pen to paper ?
"Pulling the ice axe from my leg
I staggered on
Spindrift stinging my remaining eye
I finally managed to reach the station
Only to find that the bus replacement service had broken down
After wondering to myself whether or not it should actually be called a train replacement service
I walked out onto the concourse and noticed the giant screen seemed to have been tampered with"
The opening lyrics from "National Shite Day" by Half man Half Biscuit
You have polite friends? Blimey... You must introduce me sometime. Anyway, welcome back to the blogosphere -- it's nice to have confirmation that doing the same thing for months (opening your blog) and expecting a different result (a new post) is not actually mad.
ReplyDeleteI am increasingly convinced that there is a Lamarckian component to evolution -- we just don't understand the mechanism yet. I am also convinced that there are "pathways", like river channels, that make evolution follow certain non-random courses e.g. tetrapodism -- once chosen, that path means you ain't never gonna get that fifth limb, no matter how useful it might be... As to memes, that seems like a social version of Lamarckian inheritance, doesn't it? Hey, as a non-scientist, I am entitled to my wild hunches...
Mike
Mike
DeleteWe took our summer holidays early this year, a week wandering about on Mljet, (Island, Croatia National Park), and my holiday reading was a popular book on Embryology (Jamie Davies "Life Unfolding"). The basic idea is that a process with a very complicated outcome has to be driven by a simple set of rules. Cells need to know where to go and what sort of tissue to become. In the early embryo a simple first clue is provided by whether they're on the outside of the clump, with an exposed surface, or on the inside, completely surrounded. This then leads to the solid mass of cells becoming a hollow ball etc. etc. But early on the process naturally tends to produce symmetrical structures and getting a fifth limb would probably mean messing about with an early process and the earlier you mess about the more other things you're likely to mess up too.
None of this stopped the New World monkeys from evolving prehensile tails, useful fifth "limbs" for animals that like dangling, or kangaroos from actively using their tails to get along and they could do this without breaking symmetry.
For the sake of completeness you'll not have failed to notice that most of us have only got one heart, that the symmetry does get broken. This happens at a later stage when cells are repositioned inside the body by tiny flows of current generated by cells with cilia (little hair like extensions that whirl around). Because the way the cilia rotate (Clockwise from above, 600 rpm, about an axis 45 degrees to the perpendicular) fluid gets shoved faster one way than the other. This is enough to ensure that most of our hearts end up on the left. (Half the people with mutations that stop these cilia working have hearts on the rhs)
If you think of standard genetic inheritance as vertical, generation to generation, then cultural inheritance is horizontal, to your neighbours and beyond. Modern epigenetics (which looks not just at genes but how they're turned on and off and what by) has given a route for life experience to influence not only how our own genes express themselves but also, if these changes could affect egg or sperm cells, influence future generations. But there's no direct evidence of this happening in mammals and the systems tend to reset themselves
End the hype over epigentics and lamarckian Evolution
The problem with Lamarckianism was always with the mechanism. How could being good at table tennis influence your sperm? Memes don't have this gonadic bottleneck to get through. Just tell someone about it, show them how to do it, be copied doing it and that's enough.
"How could being good at table tennis influence your sperm?"
DeleteOh, let me count the ways... ;)
The classic example of an acquired characteristic was the long neck of the giraffe, caused by constant stretching to reach higher leaves.
DeleteBeing good at table tennis is undoubtedly an acquired characteristic but probably just a bit too silly to use an example. I should have thought of something non cultural, i.e not table tennis or Sudoku, and therefore not likely to get passed on by non genetic means. How about longer earlobes in the unpierced offspring of pierced parents?
Telling the difference between the two might be tricky... Who knows whether the urge to get one's ears pierced is somehow linked to an "inexorably growing earlobe" gene?
DeleteTalking of mysterious links, have you seen the "cats are frightened of cucumbers" video that Alan Goodwin posted on YouTube? So hilarious, and yet clearly evidence of something profound in the feline psyche.
FaceBook, I mean...
DeleteYou're getting the hang of this science thing. Even if you found a link you couldn't quite be sure what sort of link it was.
DeleteI have seen the frightened cats. I know they don't have particularly good near distance vision (the whiskers take over) and they're particularly sensitive to movement. So, it seems plausible that they react to the cucumber as though it were a snake. Cats that respond this way to real snakes are likely to survive longer than those that presume its just someone teasing them with a cucumber.
And, btw, that dog image is worth 1000 words!
ReplyDeleteMike
I'd taken a couple of pictures of weeds wafting under ripples when the dog leapt in. Your appreciation is well appreciated.
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