No more successful than the hunting of the snark.
Cultural evolutionist Aunger stalks the wild meme in this abstruse treatise.
Zoologist Richard Dawkins originally coined the word “meme” as the cultural analogue of a gene: an idea, artifact, or piece of behavior that can be transmitted from person to person, survive competition, and be shared by a group in the course of cultural evolution. Memeticist Susan Blackmore chose imitation and social learning as the sine qua non of memes. Daniel Dennett raised the question of who benefits, putting memes in contention with genes to win a race involving cultural traits. Their ideas (as well as those of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists) are flawed—too simplistic, too reductionist, or too conflating of genes and memes, according to Aunger, who wants to establish a physical realty for the concept. Memes must first and foremost be replicators, he states, faithfully producing duplicates of themselves according to strict rules. He elaborates on this notion by detouring into two other forms of non-genetic replication: computer viruses and prions, which are malformed proteins in the brain. Memes, too, are in the brain: the electric meme exists at a “node”—a neuron in a particular state or a set of interconnected neurons—and is able to induce the same configuration at another node (allowing for modification so as to evolve) in a matter of milliseconds and in a manner akin to short-term memory. Indeed, he asserts, neuromemes are memories. Memes can’t move from brain to brain, however; they use “instigator signals” for transmission. Signals also can emanate from artifacts such as wagons, books, or computers; they are the means by which complexity is built into cultural evolution. In the end, Aunger offers a theory of co-evolution of memes and technology. By this time, skeptical readers, while marveling at the colossus he has constructed to account for culture (with a few deus ex machina elements thrown), will probably remain unconvinced.
No more successful than the hunting of the snark.Pub Date: July 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-0150-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
Dawkins (Zoology/Oxford Univ.) returns to the concerns of his The Blind Watchmaker (1986), presenting the case for Darwinian natural selection as the only reasonable explanation for biological diversity. The book's initial premise is that the "purpose" of life is the transmission of DNA down through the generations. Dawkins offers the metaphor of a river branching into myriad substreams to explain the central phenomenon of evolution: Each species has ancestors in common with other species but is in the present day separate and distinct; traced far enough back, each can be related to all the others. Thus, the study of the DNA in human cells (transmitted only from female ancestors), combined with fairly straightforward mathematics, leads to the conclusion that an "African Eve" — one woman who lived some 200,000 years ago — is ancestral to all living humans. (Dawkins hastens to add that she is not the only such common ancestor, nor even, probably, the most recent.) He looks at the roles of predation, cooperation, varying sex ratios, and other "strategies" that organisms develop to promote survival of their DNA. And he disposes, quietly but firmly, with arguments that certain structures in modern organisms — wings, eyes, orchid blossoms — appear so perfectly adapted that no cruder version could accomplish the tasks they perform so well. These structures, in fact, improved in slow increments, states Dawkins. The length of time for natural selection to evolve a complex eye, starting with a light-sensitive spot on the skin and incorporating minuscule changes with each generation, was less than half a million years, and the trick has been done independently at least 15 times. Finally, he considers the question of whether life on Earth is unique, or whether other planets might have evolved intelligent species. Clear and lively, with concrete examples throughout, this account addresses the major issues in modern evolutionary theory without dodging or pulling punches. An excellent overview of the subject.
Pub Date: March 29, 1995
ISBN: 0-465-01606-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
A staggering work of epistemological research.
Former book editor and publisher Rosen (Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe, 2007) pursues the question of why English-speaking peoples developed the key mechanical innovations that propelled the modern world.
In 1829, George and Robert Stephenson’s Rocket inaugurated the age of steam-powered locomotion, hauling with it a rich lineage of previous inventions mostly by enterprising men in the Anglosphere—“Great Britain and its former colonies, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.” Harnessing steam power abruptly doubled human productivity, which had been “flat as Kansas for a hundred centuries” before turning “like the business end of a hockey stick.” What prompted the English and Welsh to take that spark of genius and make something useful, even profitable, with it? Patent law had a lot to do with fostering the “itch to own one’s own work,” and Rosen devotes much of his fascinating, wide-ranging narrative to the importance of common-law rulings in favor of the original inventors—e.g., Attorney General Edward Coke, the influential English jurist at the turn of the 17th century, vehemently ruled against monopolies and supported England’s craftsmen. At the same time, Francis Bacon propounded science and invention as a free-flowing social enterprise, while John Locke defined the concept of property in terms of God-given labor. Open science, literacy, the growth of markets (e.g., the textiles explosion) and improved ironmaking skills all helped prod British, and soon American, inventors to solve mechanical problems both for personal interest and national glory. The only flaw in Rosen’s exhaustive survey is the lack of attention paid to female inventors.
A staggering work of epistemological research.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6705-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
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