Understanding Culture from a Selectionist View Language, Memetics, & Gene-Culture Coevolution

Darwin thought human language was instinctual Behaviourist perspective  Skinner & operant conditioning Cognitivist perspective  Chomsky & Language Acquisition Device The Language Debate

Why study human language at all? Cognitive revolution  “Go-ed” vs. “went” Culturalist vs. nativist extremism  How many words does the “Eskimo” language have for snow? 2, 9, 48, 100, or 200?  Pidgins & creoles Importance & Acquisition

The Origins of Human Language Noam Chomsky  Innate but not necessarily adaptive Steven Pinker  Adapted for sharing information Merlin Donald  Outcome of “mimesis” & neural plasticity Geoffrey Miller  Verbal courtship as a sexual display

Memetics (1) Dawkins introduced the concept in the final chapter of his text The Selfish Gene: “We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.”

What is a meme?  Analogous to a gene, a meme is a replicator subject to selection  Information or instructions for behaviour  Living structure (not metaphorically) Longevity, fecundity, and copying fidelity May spread “parasitically” by a variety of processes, particularly imitation Memetics (2)

Issues with Memetics Memes have fuzzy boundaries  So do genes Memes often merge together  So do genes (through introgression or horizontal transfer via viruses) Memetic selection is nonrandom  So is artificial selection (e.g., research on Drosophila) Little empirical work has been performed

Gene-Culture Coevolution (1) Classic memetic theory assumes independence of the meme from the host  Hence, memes do not need to have a relationship with the fitness of the host However, extending the meme analogy to viruses (infectiousness, host susceptibility, and social environment) converges on the same position as gene-culture coevolutionists

Coevolutionary theory is highly mathematical in nature, based on theoretical population genetics From this perspective, genetical and cultural evolution have mutual effects on each other Mode of cultural transmission may be vertical, oblique, or horizontal Moreover, transmission is nonrandom: pay- off biased or conformist Gene-Culture Coevolution (2)

Future Directions The evolution and adaptive significance of language is still being hotly debated Memetics and gene-culture coevolutionary theory may provide new avenues for research  Human diversity  Unique place of humans in the animal kingdom

The Wrap-Up Debate over the acquisition of language Origins of language Memetics Gene-culture coevolution

Things to Come Sexual Orientation  The debate over sexual orientation  Neurological evidence  Genetic Factors  Elder brother effect