The Memetic Changeover: When and Why?
This is going to be quick, I hope, and dirty, I’m sure. What I’m up to is taking the first crude steps toward an argument about why putting memes in the head makes culture unintelligible. Dawkins’...
View ArticleStir-fry Memetics
Tyler Cowen has a post at Foreign Policy, The Cookbook Theory of Economics: Why Chinese and Mexican dominate the market. Here’s a paragraph Cowen high-lighted on his own blog, Marginal Revolution:...
View ArticleWhat’s a meme? Where I got my conception
In the past few years I have settled into a conception of memes (that is, of the cultural analog to the biological gene) as properties of physical objects, events, and processes. If, for example, we’re...
View ArticleHow the Meme became a Pest
Since I’ve been posting a lot about memes recently, and from a POV in opposition to the most prevalent memetic doctrines, I thought I’d post a link to this article (full text is downloadable): Jeremy...
View ArticleBleg: Do Memes Matter to You?
For those doing or training to do academic research on linguistic and/or cultural evolution: Do memes matter to you? I’ve got the impression that the issue that I’ve been chewing on recently, the...
View ArticleThe Memetic Mind, Not: Where Dennett Goes Wrong
On the face of it, Dennett and I have very different views about cultural evolution. To be sure, we both believe that Dawkins’s initial insight is valid: that culture is an evolutionary regime unto...
View ArticleCultural Evolution: Some Terminology
Terminology is important, and pesky. I am in need of at least two terms, terms for which I have a technical use. I also dislike coining new terms. I would much prefer to use existing terms, even if it...
View ArticleDennett Upside Down Cake: Thinking About Language Evolution in the 21st Century
About two years ago Wintz placed a comment on Replicated Typo’s About page in which he lists several papers that make good background reading for someone new to the study of linguistic and cultural...
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How Do We Account for the History of the Meme Concept?
First, in asking THAT question I do not intend a bit of cutesy intellectual cleverness: Oh Wow! Let’s get the meme meme to examine it’s own history. My purpose would be just as well served by...
View ArticleCultural Evolution, So What?
I’d like this to be the last post in this series except, of course, for an introduction to the whole series, from Dan Dennett on Words in Cultural Evolution on through to this one. We’ll see. I suppose...
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Notes toward a theory of the corpus, Part 1: History
By corpus I mean a collection of texts. The texts can be of any kind, but I am interested in literature, so I’m interested in literary texts. What can we infer from a corpus of literary texts? In...
View ArticleA quick guide to cultural evolution for humanists
I’m currently working on a long article in which I review two recent critiques of computational criticism (one by Nan Z. Da and the other by Franco Moretti and Oleg Sobchuk). Moretti and Sobchuk...
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