Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

We should also remind ourselves that, just as population genetics is no substitute for ecology, which investigates the complex interactions between phenotypes and environments that ultimately yield the fitness differences presupposed by genetics, no one should anticipate that a new science of memetics would overturn or replace all the existing models and explanations of cultural phenomena developed by the social sciences. It might, however, recast them in significant ways, and provoke new inquiries in much the way genetics has inspired a flood of investigations in ecology. The books listed under Further Reading explore these prospects in some detail, but still at a very programmatic and speculative level. At this time there are still only a few works that might be listed as pioneering empirical investigations in specialized branches of memetics: Hull (1988), Pocklington and Best (1997), Gray and Jordan (2000).

Further Reading

Aunger, Robert, [June 2002], The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think and Communicate. New York: Free Press.

———, ed., 2000, Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Avital, Eytan, and Eva Jablonka, 2000, Animal Traditions: Behavioural Inheritance in Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Blackmore, Susan, 1999, The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bonner, John Tyler, 1980, The Evolution of Culture in Animals. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Boyd, Robert, and Peter Richerson, 1985, Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Brodie, Richard, 1996, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme. Seattle: Integral Press.

Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca, and Marcus Feldman, 1981, Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Dawkins, Richard, 1976, The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rev. ed., 1989.

Dennett, Daniel, 1995, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. New York: Simon & Schuster.

———, 2001, “The Evolution of Culture.” Monist, vol. 84, no. 3, pp. 305–24.

———, 2005, “From Typo to Thinko: When Evolution Graduated to Semantic Norms.”

In S. Levinson and P. Jaisson, eds., Culture and Evolution. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Durham, William, 1992, Coevolution: Genes, Culture and Human Diversity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Hull, David, 1988, Science as a Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laland, Kevin, and Gillian Brown, 2002, Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lynch, Aaron, 1996, Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society. New York: Basic Books.

Pocklington, Richard, in press, “Memes and Cultural Viruses.” In Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Journal

Artificial Life

Web Journal

Journal of Memetics. Available at http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/.

Other References

Cloak, F. T., 1975, “Is a Cultural Ethology Possible?” Human Ecology, vol. 3, pp. 161–82. Gray, Russell D., and Fiona M. Jordan, 2000, “Language Trees Support the Express-Train Sequence of Austronesian Expansion.” Nature, vol. 405 (June 29, 2000), pp. 1052–55.

Moravec, Hans, 1988, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Pocklington, Richard, and Michael L. Best, 1997, “Cultural Evolution and Units of Selection in Replicating Text.” Journal of Theoretical Biology, vol. 188, pp. 79–87.

Sperber, Dan, 2000, “An Objection to the Memetic Approach to Culture.” In Robert Aunger, ed., Darwinizing Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Williams, George, 1966, Adaptation and Natural Selection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

———, 1992, Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

APPENDIX BSome More Questions About Science

1 An invitation to an investigation