Not once in this article does the author mention memetics and yet the more I read it the more I think that is exactly the subject in focus. It is describing exactly what Dawkins and many of us here are calling memetics. So much so that I think the article raises important issues of the integration of genetic and cultural studies, which in this instace I suggest really belongs under biotech regardless of the fact that we really still don't have an adequate data bank to draw information from and also still need to bring in the mathematical models of sociology and economics to bear.
To start this discussion let's review this and add further articles to it.
A Conversation With Robert Boyd
How Culture Pushed Us to the Top of the Food Chain
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
Published: May 10, 2005
Specialties in the social sciences are proliferating at a record pace, and the job title of Dr. Robert Boyd illustrates that point perfectly.
Dr. Boyd is a theoretical biological anthropologist: he uses mathematics and deduction to develop ideas about how Homo sapiens became earth's dominant species.
Over a 30-year career, Dr. Boyd, 57, of the University of California, Los Angeles, has made it his task to show how contemporary human behavior is rooted in the cultures that humans developed as they lived the evolutionary process.
In the recent book "Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution," Dr. Boyd and his co-author, an environmental scientist, explained why culture was "essential to human adaptation, as much a part of human biology as bipedal locomotion."
Q. Your book is called "Not by Genes Alone." Why that title?
A. We wanted to call it "The Nature of Culture," but our publishers, wouldn't have it. They didn't want us stuck on the social science shelves at the bookstore, where books generally don't do well.
The book is a synthesis of current thinking on the role culture plays in human evolution. My co-author, Peter Richerson, and I believe that when discussing the traits that have helped humans become such a successful species, we should avoid that old nature-versus-nurture debate.
That's the view that behavior is either learned or genetic. Instead, we need to be talking about genes and culture, and how they interact with each other.
Most people think that culture is free from the shackles of biology because it is learned. That's wrong. Learned behavior is shaped by psychological mechanisms that have evolved, just like any other trait. Culture is special in that it is transmitted from individual to individual and evolves through the generations.
Q. Among social scientists, the conventional wisdom has it that you've filled in an important piece of the evolutionary puzzle. What makes your theory new?
A. Unlike the conventional nature-nurture view, we explain why culture is adaptive, and why it causes people to behave so differently from other animals. We say that while in the long run all organisms adapt by genes, only humans can accumulate knowledge over long periods of time and transfer it so that the next generation can improve on it. It's this trick that has allowed people to be as successful as we are.
We have the widest range of any mammal. We occupy every inch of the globe basically except Antarctica. We were able to do it because different human populations can acquire from the previous generation the special tools and ways you need to live in such a wide variety of places.
There's no way that genes can teach an Inuit how to make a kayak, but others in the community can. Humans are animals who evolved in the tropics, but who now hunt for seals in the Arctic. We've been able to do that because we have culture.
Q. Don't animals have culture?
A. Not in the sense that they have traditions that change as they are transmitted. O.K., chimpanzees in one forest in Africa use short sticks to fish for ants. In another, they use longer ones. Yes, this seems to be socially transmitted. But what doesn't happen is an accumulation of knowledge. What they don't get is something that gets better and better through time.
In human cultures, things change with each generation. Populations create things that are useful in their survival and these things evolve and get better so that people can flourish. No single individual could have created something as complex and functional as the kayak.
Q. There are biologists who think that a lot of our behavior is hard-wired into our genes. Do you?
A. I don't think anything is hard-wired. Even the number of fingers on your hands isn't hard-wired. Even the genes that get expressed as your limbs develop depending on environmental circumstances. The thalidomide babies of the 1950's know that rather directly.
Q. There was a time when anthropologists went off to New Guinea and observed how the local people lived. You work in Los Angeles, where you produce theories and mathematical models. Should Margaret Mead be rolling in her grave?
A. I've done field work. But what Margaret Mead did was cultural anthropology. I'm a biological anthropologist. We look at bones, other animals, evolution. One of the things I've tried to do is bring the two subdisciplines closer.
As for all that mathematics, I use it because it gives a social scientist a kind of mental prosthesis. It lets you make certain your deductions are cogent. Unfortunately, mathematics also forces you to simplify things in a way that verbal reasoning doesn't.
So you always have to work, back and forth, between mathematics and verbal reasoning in order to have good explanations. At the end of the day, we often send graduate students out to the field to test what we've hypothesized with math models.
Q. Why is so much of social science moving toward the use of mathematical models rather than field observations?
A. In fact, I see the opposite happening. In economics, the most mathematical of the social sciences, there's a big trend toward field observations used in combination with mathematics. Ernst Fehr from the University of Zurich runs all these interesting experiments with bicycle messengers to determine whether or not people will work longer with higher wages. He found that when you paid them more they worked less.
Q. As a scholar of evolution are you surprised that Darwin remains so controversial?
A. I'm dismayed. I teach evolution in a basic undergraduate course at U.C.L.A. If you're a psychology major, you have to take it. The religious students try to argue with me! I've had a Muslim tell me that evolution wasn't in his religious texts so it couldn't be true. I had a young Christian woman in tears at the end of the term: "You convinced me. And now what am I going to do?"
She lived in a small town where evangelical religion played a big role. To doubt Genesis was almost like holding immoral beliefs. I felt strange because I'd made her life a lot more difficult by convincing her of what I considered to be true. But there was no help for it.
Q. A new version of creationism, "intelligent design," is being pushed by the anti-Darwinists. It says more or less that the world is too complicated to be an accident. Do your students cite it?
A. Not just my students. "Intelligent design" seems to be creationism stripped of its explicitly Christian biblical background, and so it has wider appeal. My wife has a relative: he's Jewish, and he is attracted to it. Every once in a while, he says, "You don't really believe that that natural selection gives rise to something as complicated as an eye?"
And then I have to give him this whole speech on how it works. He's never convinced. And he's a medical doctor!
Q. The anti-Darwinists of an earlier era had a motto: "I'm no monkey." In some ways, doesn't your theory of cultural transmission have the same message?
A. Well, obviously, we're not monkeys. But that doesn't mean that we didn't evolve. I live in Los Angeles, negotiate the freeways, go the supermarket and the beach; baboons don't do that. The real question is, How do we explain that we are different without giving up the truth: that we evolved from something like a monkey and that culture helped make our success possible.
