IN THE FORUM

This week’s feature essay, Temes: An Emerging Third Replicator casts culture in a different light than it has previously been seen at OTH. The piece, written by Susan Blackmore, a psychologist and writer researching consciousness, memes, and anomalous experiences, argues that culture evolves in its own right and for its own benefit — and not for our benefit or for our genes’ benefit.

Susan Blackmore is best known for her book, The Meme Machine (1999), a theory of memetics. She is Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth and has a degree in psychology and physiology from Oxford University and a PhD in parapsychology from the University of Surrey. Her research interests include consciousness and evolutionary theory.

Here, she argues that “humans are earth’s ‘Pandoran species’ who let the second replicator — memes — out of the box. We then became meme machines, protecting, copying and working for memes. Earth now has three replicators — genes (the basis of life), memes (the basis of human culture) and temes (the basis of emerging electronic technology).”

Blackmore agrees with OTH authors Bill Benzon, Joseph Carroll, Raymond Tallis, and Terrence Deacon that we must understand language if we would understand our species’ singularity. She concurs with Deacon’s concluding sentence in his post, that “We have been made in the image of the word.” However, these surface points of agreement may be misleading, as Blackmore’s view of how language evolved is significantly at odds with these other authors’ views.

Blackmore disagrees with Deacon, for example, when he argues that the ability to make symbols is key to understanding the human. For Blackmore, the critical factor is rather our ability to imitate. She argues that language consists of a broad array of memes, all such memes beginning life as noises selfishly exploiting human brains to replicate themselves. As their number and complexity grew, memes imposed a cognitive load that might have been expected to overwhelm the humans they used for survival. However, the sounds evolved instead into memes which, in turn, shaped us constructively into meme machines. We acquired language, in other words, not because it was adaptive for our genes but because it was adaptive for our memes. Blackmore extends this argument to electronic technologies. If we foresee the emergence of sophisticated artificial intelligences in virtual networks, the reason is not because we have desired and designed them. It is, rather, because the networks are fit vehicles for the “temes” replicating within them.

Blackmore also disagrees with Joe Carroll who sees art as a primary and irreducible human need . Blackmore argues that art has evolved “memetically,” a process not under our control or based in anything like “human nature” but, rather, a kind of virus that visits itself upon us, serving its own purposes.

Blackmore’s essay represents our second collaboration with The New York Times’s opinion series, The Stone, moderated by Simon Critchley. Begin reading here and watch for the link to the Times. Remember to return to our Forum, however, to discuss the piece with Blackmore and our readers.

Previous Contributors

Bateson, Sir Patrick. Hunting and Science

Batson, Dan. Empathic Concern and Altruism in Humans

Beer, Dame Gillian. Late Darwin And The Problem Of The Human

Benzon, William L. Cultural Evolution: A Vehicle For Cooperative Interaction Between The Sciences And The Humanities

Blier, Suzanne Preston. Animalia: The Natural World, Art, and Theory

Boden, Margaret Can Computer Models Help Us To Understand Human Creativity?

Carroll, Joe. The Adaptive Function of Literature and the Other Arts

Churchland, Patricia and Christopher Suhler. Control: Conscious And Otherwise

Deacon, Terrence. On the Human: Rethinking the Natural Selection of Human Language

Doris, John. Do You Know What You’re Doing?

Gillespie, Michael Allen. Science and the Humanities

Hacking, Ian. Commercial Genome Reading

Hayles, Katherine N. Distributing/Disturbing the Chinese Room

Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. How Humans Became Such Other-Regarding Apes

Leiter, Brian. Moral Skepticism And Moral Disagreement: Developing An Argument From Nietzsche

Lenoir, Tim. Contemplating Singularity

Lycan, William. Qualitative Experience in Machines

Marks, Stuart A. Wild Animals and a Different Human Face

McCarty, Willard. Who Am I Computing?

Pippin, Robert. Participants and Spectators.

Rabinow, Paul. Biopower, Dignity, Synthetic Anthropos

Railton, Peter. Moral Camouflage Or Moral Monkeys?

Ritvo, Harriet. Humans And Humanists (And Scientists)

Rosati, Connie S. Narrative and Personal Good

Rosenberg, Alex. The Disenchanted Naturalist’s Guide to Reality

Sober, Elliott. Common Ancestry And Natural Selection In Darwin’s Origin

Sterelny, Kim. The Evolved Apprentice

Stoneking, Mark. Does Culture Prevent or Drive Human Evolution?

Strier, Karen B. The Challenge Of Comparisons In Primatology

Suhler, Christopher and Patricia Churchland. Control: Conscious And Otherwise

Tallis, Raymond. Does Evolution Explain Our Behavior?

Tabbi, Joseph. On Reading 300 Works Of Electronic Literature

Turner, Mark. The Scope of Human Thought

Forum Calendar

Scroll ahead to see which week you’ll be able to engage your favorite Contributor. It’s a distinguished list, including:

Simine Vazire
Jeff McMahan
Leslie Kaufman
Frans de Waal

Recent events

The New York Times is running a series of articles exploring developments in AI. “Smarter Than You Think” is particularly interested in the social and cultural implications of advances in information technology and computer robotics. Computers Make Strides in Recognizing Speech features a picture of the receptionist outside Eric Horvitz’s Microsoft office. It is a computer monitor featuring a female avatar capable of recognizing guests’ faces and asking appropriate questions of them. In What is I.B.M.’s Watson? we read of a computer that beats human competitors in Jeopardy-style trivia contests even when the questions are posed in natural language.

Update

Kim Sterelny has posted a concluding response to those who commented on his “The Evolved Apprentice.”

In the News

In the News is a monthly round-up of recent developments in the study of humans, animals, and machines. We provide links to two references for each story: first, to the scholarly record in the professional literature and, second, to a popular media account illustrating how the research is being presented to the public. Compiled by Stephen Zachary. Read more.