Gladwell hatin’
Some red meat for readers, Malcolm Gladwell, Memes and Intellectual Honesty:
Gladwell comes across as a child trying to explain why his hand was in the cookie jar. He advances a series of unconvincing, somewhat contradictory explanations, hoping that we will ignore the larger problem. So far as I can tell from Google searching, this strategy has worked; people have noted that Gladwell is talking about memes but no one has called him out for his failure to acknowledge this prior work. This isn’t acceptable. Gladwell’s behavior is intellectually dishonest. His failure to credit Dawkins or others who have thought about these ideas before him does a disservice to those individuals and to honest intellectual discourse. I don’t think Gladwell’s behavior constitutes plagiarism, but it certainly would be punished if it occurred in an academic setting. Failure to cite prior work results in a paper being rejected from any legitimate journal. If a student hands in an assignment that fails to cite prior work, the student receives a bad grade, if not outright failure. Gladwell owes his readers and Richard Dawkins an apology for his failure to acknowledge that Gladwell’s idea recycles Dawkins’s earlier work.
Labels: Gladwell
I don’t want to defend Gladwell, so I’m not going to here, but on the other hand, the meme concept has gotten way to much play than it deserves. Dawkins, Dennett, et al. use this concept as an explanatory device–and were there such a thing, it would be greatfully explanatory!!–but then cite it’s explanatory power as it that were proof for its existence.
Before I believe in memes, I want a meme advocate to explain this: how are memes individuated?
Example: Is the meme for a wheel also the meme for a circle, or cylinder? Is the meme for paternalism the same as a meme against maternalism? Or are they only contraries? Is the meme for authority the same as the meme for rulership? Is the meme for football the same as a meme for Sport? Does the meme for an act of commission entail a meme for omission?
Surely if something is heritable, it must be a natural kind, and for any thing to be a natural kind it must have clear criteria for individuation, so until someone provides sufficient individuation criteria for memes, the concept is not all that more sophisticated than ‘here be dragons!’, ie. ‘here be something we can’t explain in the least’…..
razib,
i’m a sociologist at a top 10 department who specializes in issues similar to The Tipping Point and while I don’t agree with everything Gladwell says, I can vouch that this critique is utter nonsense. as a matter of fact, there are plenty of “legitimate journals” and “academic settings” where nobody cares about Dawkins because the meme idea just isn’t as novel or as powerful as a lot of non-specialists think. i’m actually unusual among specialists in the field in that i sometimes do cite Selfish Gene, but even I only cite him parenthetically because, frankly, his ideas are not central to the field. certainly i was never assigned to read him in grad school.
lots of highly respected academics in this area (I’m thinking of Mark Granovetter, Paul DiMaggio, Eric Abrahamson, Duncan Watts, Everett Rogers, Sarah Soule, and David Strang) never cite Dawkins but nobody would call them plagiarists or say their hands are in the cookie jar. these sociology / orgs /comm scholars are who Gladwell was popularizing in Tipping Point and he candidly acknowledges it.
If you think Dawkins is great, fine, but it’s not like it’s a failure bordering on plagiarism if someone else prefers an older and more sophisticated literature.
I have had a similar discussion on a facebook blog just this week. The blog discussion was on – What is, or is there, a difference between ultruism and morality. IMO the answer is YES. Why? Because ultruistic behavior does seem to be a part of group selection, because cooperation does seem to have provided Homo sapiens sapiens, greater survivorship, and greater reproductive success. Part of the argument against such thought came from a Cambridge University lab, which argued that ultruism and morality is the same, since even chimpanzees show moral virtue. My argument of course, was that ultruism was a genetic factor, amongst many animal species, but morality was a cultural meme, which repesented the rules of the game of life, and which was entrained in the behavior of a population, in a similar way, as was described by Dawkins. Of course, such a statement resulted in a fierce attack, with my argument described as pseudo science.
Here is my last reply:
“I’ve been thinking all day about the effect of cultural upbringing on feral children (children reared by wolves), and the meaning behind the idea of the meme. It is just so interesting reading about a wolf child, which is altruistic to other wolves (members of the wolf child’s substitute family), but totally suspicious and non-ultruistic, to other humans. Why does a human child, with the mind of a wolf, not know how to empathise with other humans. Even more strange, how could behavioural memes, provided by other wolves, programme the life history of a human phenotype/genotype, to the point where limb tendon?s and muscles shorten in an attempt to morph a human body into that of a wolf. Even the canine teeth seem to be longer in a wolf child to that of a human child, brought up in a human culture. Lastly, why is it almost impossible to teach a wolf child, how to speak, a human language, after the child?s linguistic parts, in the brain, have been programmed to speak, wolf. If it is possible to teach a human child, even an adult, a second, third for even forth or more language, then why is it so difficult for a wolf child, to partake in the human reality, and speak, as an example, english or chinese. Since a wolf child is only concerned about the safety of other pack members, such an altruistic behaviour, at least to me, looks more of a genetic factor, an inherited instinct. However, morality (rules of the game of life), as a cultural meme, as passed to a wolf child, by witnessing other wolves, could only represent the culture of a pack of wolves. It is learned/acquired behaviour. It could be said, the cultural software, of being a wolf. This whole argument begs a question – How is it possible for a human being, to copy the behavior of a wolf, in full belief, that they are a wolf.”
There is of course another argument. This comes from “Frozen Shoulder Syndrome” (adhesive capsulitis). In my clinic most of my work involves motor rehab for patients with brain damage, and so I use the concepts of the meme and mirror neurons on a daily basis. Of course, I do understand, that the meme and mirror neurons are controversial, but lets be honest, what have I or my patients have to loose, when there is not substitute theory, on how to build a broken brain.
Anyway, let me get back to Frozen Shoulder. The majority of my patients, for this particular problem, are female, and the majority of cases involve the same arm, used to clip a bra, which clips posteriorly. The modern hominin shoulder is a masterpiece of darwinian evolution, but I can not help reflect on how the selection of cooking and farming has affected the shoulder’s skeletal morphology. I have always wondered – How many generations, have hominids been throwing sticks and stones. Not throwing sticks and stones like a chimpanzee, but like a modern human. Personally I would say, that since late Homo erectus, say 600kya to 800kya. In fact, I would say that throwing sticks and stones became a instinctive behavior, through a meme process, as our ancestors realized the benefits, of not only, how pretending to throw a stick or stone can fend off aggressive animals, including other competing hominids, but also, actually throwing sticks and stones, created the idea of the weapon. The rest is history, but instinctively, all children, use their arms to throw objects. Could such behavior represent a cultural meme, which was at one point selected alongside a growing trend for a slimmed down shoulder skeleton, which, naturally allowed for throwing sticks and stones. Could the adaptation of a similar life history, like throwing sticks and stones, be a good example of a meme spreading like a epidemic throughout the hominid species. Of course, throwing sticks and stones, involves a forward motion. Manipulating a posterior bra clip, however, is a completely odd behavior, not provided for, by the natural design of the human shoulder. Thus the possible reason why so many women, suffer inflammation of the shoulder capsule, of the arm most used to manipulate a poster bra clip.
As you can imagine, although the meme can not as yet be proven, there is sufficient understanding, amongst those who use meme theory in a healing practice, to point to high probability, of YES.
With regard to Malcome Gladwell, I have read “The Tipping Point.” To be honest, his work is interesting and defendable.
When it comes to Dawkins, I have no comment.
How about the notion that Gladwell didn’t much want to talk about “memes” because the very concept as set out by Dawkins is trite one moment, confused the next, and absurd the following?
Maybe Gladwell just didn’t want all the baggage?
Not that Gladwell didn’t manage to be trite, confused, and absurd in his own way nonetheless.
My doctor told me that the human shoulder is exapted and not well designed for most of the purposes it’s used for. It’s one of the most prominent of the human body parts that an engineer working from scratch would design differently.
As far as the wheel meme, it’s obviously more than a circle. I’d say that a pair of wheels connected by an axle and bearing payload is the meme. The unicycle is a later simplification (it wasn’t invented one wheel at a time). Rolling logs over cylinders (logs) was a meme of its own.
One of the problems archeologists have in knowing where discoveries were made is the rapidity of their diffusion. As for the development of the oxcart specifically, they have a rough idea when it originated, but the archeological timescale is pretty coarse and on that scale, they can’t pinpoint a place of origin because it appeared everywhere. (Of course, vehicles by nature diffuse faster than, e.g., new ways of building foundations for buildings).
One analytic advantage of the meme idea is that it separates elements from the culture complexes and societies originating them and also from the individual bearers. Thus an element of, e.g., Islam can move to Christianity or Buddhism without anyone changing religion. Or alternatively, conversion to Buddhism or one of the other religions can involve adopting certain memes while rejecting or ignoring others, in the strongest cases (NW European Christianity, Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism, Indonesia Islam) developing entirely transformed versions of the religion.
I should have said: memes are often not ideas in the common sense of the word, but artifacts and practices (and art motifs). (In some high analytic sense the wheel and axle is an idea, but in practice it’s a thing). Memes transmitted by example and use are more potent than memes transmitted by speech and explanation. The pop idea of memes, e.g. things like the Hampster Dance that proliferate instantaneously on the internet, is pretty trivialized.
Actually, under the rules that most universities pay lip service to, Gladwell did commit plagiarism. At the beginning of every school year, our Provost sends out a detailed memorandum explaining the various kinds of plagiarism in tedious detail; no doubt other Provosts do so, too.
Under these rules, plagiarism is not merely the appropriation of exact wording or data or figures without citation, it is any paraphrase without citation no matter how short. Failure to cite Dawkins (and others) for the meme concept clearly is plagiarism at my school.
Whether Gladwell would be penalized, of course, depends on his institution’s local politics. There are numerous examples of gross plagiarism and outright theft of laboratory samples in the biological/medical field that went unpunished because of the prestige of the accused.
I thought Martin Gardner devastated the whole ridiculous concept of “memes” some time ago.
If anything, Dawkins should be happy to no longer be associated with such dreck.
Just a pointer that Gabriel made a similar, slightly longer comment on the original blog entry and we’ve had a discussion there. (Trying not to have duplicate discussions).
joshua,
thanks for referring back to the other thread
bob sykes,
your comment presupposes that gladwell was actually inspired by dawkins rather than simply coming to similar ideas in parallel. anyway, the interesting thing about your comment is it reminds me of a fight between kathy edin and elijah anderson. edin’s work was similar to anderson’s earlier work and she indeed cited him, but he thought that the similarities were such that a simple cite was insufficient and she should have dedicated the book to him or something. anyway, it’s an interesting case in that it parallels the fuzziness of what can be interpreted as “plagiarism.”
In what I could find of Gardner’s critique of memetics, he seemed to think that memes were biologically reductive, whereas they clearly represent a parallel independent evolution.
I suppose it’s a valid criticism to say that genetics involves a complex relationship between two levels which are not adjacent or recognizably similar, physical traits and the genes coding for them, whereas memes are really just one-level.
So, Bob, given that you didn’t tell us which Provost, are you technically plagiarising that rule?
I thought the idea of “Darwinian evolution among ideas/concepts/religions/technologies/ any kind of transmissible intellectual construct” was ancient. But after a bit of googling, I come to the shocking conclusion that nobody described it expliticly before Dawkins and his “memes” – or if they did, it remained confidential.
Now, is that because nobody ever had the idea, or because those who did found it too ridiculously obvious to warrant publication? Especially when it comes to religions, where the whole gamut of evolutionary processes (heredity/mutation/recombination/selection) is illustrated by well-known historical examples.
Mr. Emerson,
I respect your opinion so if you think there’s something there, I’ll go back to resrving judgment.
To me, pace Gardner, the criticism is that “meme” is just old wine in new bottles.
toto, I would guess people just didnt quite see it. They would think of “scurrilous Persian customs infecting Alexander” or “terrible western ideas going around” but not necessarily think of the memes evolving, maybe?
And then, you think of great thinkers or artists being influenced by older ideas, and changing them. They definitely evolve and who could doubt that. Yet one is focused on the thinkers themselves as agents, one would perhaps not see them as hosts, or think see that the ideas are “the same” through their changes, preserved over all the changes, as we are presumably “the same” as some african erectines by virtue of them being on our lineage, we just happen to not be identical to them anymore.
One thing thats disanalogous to “real” evolution, and may make the analogy hard to see, is that ideas can recombine outside their “species” and outside their genus, family, order. Aspects of marxism (universalist on its own terms) can combine with localism and traditionalism. The aesthetic classicism of Goethe can form part of the classicalist strand in german fascism via Nietzsche, and turn back from politics into art as an influence (passing through the barrel of a gun) on nazi-era fine painting. Art (and “science”) follow political ideas also in the case of bolshevism. In these things there are no sound taxa, at least no monophyletic ones. Naturally you are aware of all this but my point is that it could have obscured the analogy in times prior to Dawkins.
One of the things I like is the atomism, which is what a lot of people don’t like. It’s true that a whole culture is more than just a collection of memes, but it’s also true that, for example, cultural transmission (for example, the transmission of Buddhism to China) is never the transmission of a whole culture. It’s a transmission of memes from one whole culture to another. An analytic, atomic analysis of what got transmitted and what didn’t would be a start at figuring out exactly what happened. (For example, the caste system did not make the transition, so that almost all Chinese Buddhists believed in the possibility of liberation in a single lifetime, which was regarded as rare or impossible by most Indian Buddhists.)
There’s also a book, “Silk and Religion” which showed how, along with the silk trade, certain religious practices traveled along with the silk: the use of silk for shrouds, the veneration of relics, and the high status of the color purple.
As far as trabsmission of culture in time, again, rather than saying something mushy like “American culture changed dramatically while retaining essential continutiy” between, say, 1860 and 1960, you could get a first reading by looking for memes which had disappeared, which had newly appeared, or which remained, but in an entirely different context.
I don’t think the concept has the power that the gene concept has, it isn’t revolutionatry, but I think it’s useful.
Donald Campbell’s “Evolutionary Epistemology” a couple of decades earlier might be a stronger statement of similar ideas. By now I’m accustomed to thinking about most of reality avove the thermodynamic threshold as random variation and selective retention, or as Gould says, proliferation and decimation. And it applies to cultural history.
“Tipping points” seem distinct from memes. They are based on the idea of multiple equilibria for a system. I think there’s a decent bit of truth to the idea, like James Q. Wilson on the broken windows effect and Mark Kleiman on High Point, just to draw from criminology. The idea has though been misapplied in the forms of “Big Push” development and “hundredth monkey” mumbo jumbo.
I thought the idea of “Darwinian evolution among ideas/concepts/religions/technologies/ any kind of transmissible intellectual construct” was ancient. But after a bit of googling, I come to the shocking conclusion that nobody described it expliticly before Dawkins and his “memes” – or if they did, it remained confidential.
In fact, the concept of evolution of ideas does have a truly ancient history, though the particularly Darwinian twist on it is of course more recent.
There’s a useful article in Wikipedia on sociocultural evolution.
The peculiarly Darwinian twist on sociocultural evolution goes back to, well, Darwin. Here’s a passage from another useful wiki article on so-called dual inheritance theory:
The idea that human cultures undergo a similar evolutionary process as genetic evolution goes back at least to Darwin[44] In the 1960s Donald T. Campbell published some of the first theoretical work that adapted principles of evolutionary theory to the evolution of cultures. [45] In 1976 two developments in cultural evolutionary theory set the stage for DIT. In that year Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene introduced ideas of cultural evolution to a popular audience. Although one of the best-selling science books of all time, because of its lack of mathematical rigor, it had little impact on the development of DIT. Also in 1976, geneticists Marcus Feldman and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza published the first dynamic models of gene-culture coevolution.
Obviously, this is claiming that Dawkins was in the main merely reporting on the ideas pre-existing amongst a number of evolutionary biologists. This seems to comport well with the idea that in the same year Cavalli-Sforza published a formal, scientifically rigorous account of the same phenomenon.
Dawkins’ concept of so-called memes seems to add the further idea that somehow the items that are being transmitted via sociocultural revolution can be nicely individuated in the same way as are genes. That concept, is, in any reasonable understanding, simply false in general.
My impression is that most other evolutionary biologists had a pretty good sense as to how far one might push the analogy with biological evolution into the cultural domain, and knew it would be a bad idea to claim an analogy to a gene in the cultural domain. Dawkins, glib and shallow as he is (he is in the end a mere popularizer, like Gladwell himself), insisted on taking the analogy way past its breaking point.
Oh, one other point apropos Dawkins’ contribution of memes.
What was the comment attributed to the Good Dr Johnson?
?Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.?
liberalbiorealist:
I’ve never before commented on the matter but I think you’re pretty much right. Though I haven’t read any of what Dawkins might have said or maintained and know only what I’ve read in other, similar discussions, my initial (and unchanged) reaction is that, with the exception of the relatively techno-catchy term (meme) itself, the whole matter is nothing more than a subject that occasionally formed the matter of a BS-session back (’50s) when I was in school. The formation, extension, and progress of an idea (or ideas) is fascinating but (whether unfortunately or not) one we’re never liable to know very much
about (my snap judgement on the matter being that it’s something whose comprehension would require a superhuman intelligence).