An anti-memeite Wikipedia is also known as a follower of the Modularity of mind view as implied by Noam Chomsky's concept of a universal, generative grammar. Jerry Fodor, drawing from Chomsky and other evidence from linguistics as well as implications from optical illusions and philosophy of mind, revived the idea of the modularity of mind, without the notion of precise physical localizability of the mental faculties, in the 1980s and became one of the most articulate proponents for it with the 1983 publication of Modularity of Mind[1].

Doubts about memetics

A basic difficulty in the study of memes involves the frequent lack of clarity as to what distinguishes one meme from another.[citation needed]

In much the same way that the selfish gene concept offers a way of understanding and reasoning about aspects of biological evolution, the meme concept can conceivably assist in the better understanding of some otherwise puzzling aspects of human culture. However, if one cannot test for "better" empirically, the question will remain whether or not the meme concept counts as a valid scientific theory. Memetics thus remains a science in its infancy, a protoscience to proponents, or a pseudoscience to detractors.

Another objection to the study of the evolution of memes in genetic terms (although not to the existence of memes) involves the fact that the cumulative evolution of genes depends on biological selection-pressures neither too great nor too small in relation to mutation-rates. There seems no reason to think that the same balance will exist in the selection pressures on memes.<ref>Kim Sterelney and Paul E. Griffiths, Sex and Death: And Introduction to Philosophy of Biology, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999, p.333</ref>

Some prominent researchers in evolutionary psychology and anthropology, including Scott Atran, Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer, John Tooby and others, argue the possibility of incompatibility between modularity of mind and memetics. On their view, minds structure certain communicable aspects of the ideas produced, and these communicable aspects generally trigger or elicit ideas in other minds through inference (to relatively rich structures generated from often low-fidelity input) and not high-fidelity replication or imitation. Atran discusses communication involving religious beliefs as a case in point. In one set of experiments, he asked religious people to write down on a piece of paper the meanings of the Ten Commandments. Despite the subjects' own expectations of consensus, interpretations of the commandments showed wide ranges of variation, with little evidence of consensus. In another experiment, normal subjects and autistic subjects interpreted ideological and religious sayings (for example, "Let a thousand flowers bloom" or "To everything there is a season"). Autistics showed a significant tendency to closely paraphrase and repeat content from the original statement (for example: "Don't cut flowers before they bloom"). Controls tended to infer a wider range of cultural meanings with little replicated content (for example: "Go with the flow" or "Everyone should have equal opportunity"). Only the autistic subjects — who lack inferential capacity normally associated with aspects of theory of mind — came close to functioning as "meme machines".<ref>Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, New York, Oxford University Press, 2002, chapter 9 "The Trouble with Memes".</ref>

Controversy surrounds the word meme. In part this arises because a number of possible (though not mutually exclusive) interpretations of the nature of the concept have arisen:

1. The least controversial claim suggests that memes provide a useful philosophical perspective with which to examine cultural evolution. Proponents of this view argue that considering cultural developments from a meme's eye view — as if memes, or the people who carry them, acted to maximise their own replication and survival — can lead to useful insights and yield valuable predictions into how culture develops over time. Dawkins himself seems to have favoured this approach.[citation needed]
2. Other theorists, such as Francis Heylighen, have focused on the need to provide an empirical grounding for memetics in order for people to regard it as a real and useful scientific discipline.[citation needed] Given the nebulous (and in many cases subjective) nature of many memes, providing such an empirical grounding has to date proved challenging.[citation needed] However, a recent study by Mikael Sandberg, further elaborates the memetic approach to empirical studies of innovation diffusion in organisations.<ref>"The Evolution of IT Innovations in Swedish Organizations: A Darwinian Critique of ‘Lamarckian’ Institutional Economics", Journal of Evolutionary Economics (on-line 2006, in print 2007)</ref>
3. A third approach, exemplified by Dennett and by Susan Blackmore in her book The Meme Machine (1999), seeks to place memes at the centre of a radical and counter-intuitive naturalistic theory of mind and of personal identity. Evan Louis Sheehan uses the hierarchical model of cortical architecture proposed by Jeff Hawkins to develop such a memetic theory of mind in his book The Mocking Memes: A Basis for Automated Intelligence.

See also

Modularity

Language module

Visual modularity

Society of Mind which proposes the mind is made up of agent

pseudoscience

creationism

For contrasting views:

Neuroplasticity

meme

memetics

Richard Dawson

Charles Darwin

Evolution

pseudoscience

References

Further reading

Barrett, H. C., and Kurzban, R. (2006). Modularity in cognition: Framing the debate. Psychological Review, 113, 628-647. Kurzban 2006.pdf Full text

Animal Minds : Beyond Cognition to Consciousness Donald R. Griffin, University of Chicago Press, 2001 (ISBN 0226308650)