creators_name: Gabora, Liane editors_name: Gabora, Liane type: journalp datestamp: 2004-02-03 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:55:28 metadata_visibility: show title: Ideas are not replicators but minds are ispublished: pub subjects: comp-sci-complex-theory subjects: bio-evo subjects: bio-behav subjects: cog-psy subjects: phil-mind subjects: phil-sci subjects: bio-theory subjects: phil-epist full_text_status: public keywords: associative network, acquired characteristics, autocatalytic closure, conceptual closure, culture, evolution, idea, origin of life, replicator, self-replication, worldview. abstract: An idea is not a replicator because it does not consist of coded self-assembly instructions. It may retain structure as it passes from one individual to another, but does not replicate it. The cultural replicator is not an idea but an associatively-structured network of them that together form an internal model of the world, or worldview. A worldview is a primitive, uncoded replicator, like the autocatalytic sets of polymers widely believed to be the earliest form of life. Primitive replicators generate self-similar structure, but because the process happens in a piecemeal manner, through bottom-up interactions rather than a top-down code, they replicate with low fidelity, and acquired characteristics are inherited. Just as polymers catalyze reactions that generate other polymers, the retrieval of an item from memory can in turn trigger other items, thus cross-linking memories, ideas, and concepts into an integrated conceptual structure. Worldviews evolve idea by idea, largely through social exchange. An idea participates in the evolution of culture by revealing certain aspects of the worldview that generated it, thereby affecting the worldviews of those exposed to it. If an idea influences seemingly unrelated fields this does not mean that separate cultural lineages are contaminating one another, because it is worldviews, not ideas, that are the basic unit of cultural evolution. date: 2004-01 date_type: published publication: Biology and Philosophy volume: 19 number: 1 publisher: Kluwer Academic Press pagerange: 127-143 refereed: TRUE referencetext: Aunger R. (ed.): 2000, Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Baldassarre, G.: 2001, 'Cultural Evolution of 'Guiding Criteria' and Behaviour in a Population of Neural-network Agents', Journal of Memetics 4. Blackmore, S.: 1999, The Meme Machine, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Blackmore, S.: 2000, 'The Power of Memes', Scientific American 283(4): 52-61. Borger, T. & Sarin, R.: 1997, 'Learning through Reinforcement and the Replicator Dynamics', Journal of Economic Theory 77: 1-14. Borkar, V. S., Jain, S. & Rangarajan, G.: 1998, 'Dynamics of Individual Specialization and Global Diversification in Communities', Complexity 3(3): 50-56. Boyd, R. & Richerson, P. J.: (1985), Culture and the Evolutionary Process, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Campbell, D.: 1987, 'Evolutionary Epistomology', in G. Radnitzky, &. W. W. Bartley III (eds.) Evolutionary Epistomology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge, Open Court, LaSalle IL. Cavalli-Sforza L. L. & Feldman M. W.: 1981, Cultural Transmission and Evolution: a Quantitative Approach, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Cemin, S. C. & Smolin, L.: 1997, 'Coevolution of Membranes and Channels: A Possible Step in the Origin of Life', Journal of Theoretical Biology (October issue) [adap-org/9709004]. Churchland, P. S. & Sejnowski, T.: 1992, The Computational Brain, MIT Press, Cambridge MA. Corballis, M. C.: 2002, From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Csanyi, V.: 1989, Evolutionary Systems and Society: A General Theory of Life, Mind and Culture, Duke University Press, Durham. Cziko, G.: 1997, Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution, MIT Press, Cambridge MA. Dawkins, R.: 1976, The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Dawkins, R.: 1982, The Extended Phenotype, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Dennett, D.: 1995, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Simon & Schuster, New York. Durham, W. H.: 1991, Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity, Stanford University Press, Stanford. Edelman, G. M.: 1987, Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, Basic Books, New York. Eigen M. & Schuster, P.: 1979, The Hypercycle: A Principle of Natural Self-organization, Springer, New York. Farmer, J. D., Kauffman, S. A. & Packard, N. H.: 1986, 'Autocatalytic Replication of Polymers', Physica D 22(50). Farmer, D. & Lo, A. W.: 1999, 'Frontiers of Finance: Evolution and Efficient Markets', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 96, 9991-9992. Gabora, L.: 1995, 'Meme and variations: A Computer Model of Cultural Evolution', in L. Nadel & D. Stein (eds.), 1993 Lectures in Complex Systems, Addison-Wesley, Boston. Gabora, L.: 1996, A Day in the Life of a Meme', Philosophica 57: 901-938. Gabora, L.: 1997, 'The Origin and Evolution of Culture and Creativity', Journal of Memetics 1(1): 1-27. Gabora, L.: 1998, ' Autocatalytic Closure in a Cognitive System: A Tentative Scenario for the Origin of Culture', Psycholoquy 9(67), 1-26. [adap-org/9901002]. Gabora, L.: 1999, 'Weaving, Bending, Patching, Mending the Fabric of Reality: A Cognitive Science Perspective on Worldview Inconsistency', Foundations of Science 3(2): 395-428. Gabora, L.: 2000, 'Conceptual Closure: Weaving Memories into an Interconnected Worldview', in G. Van de Vijver & J. Chandler (eds.), Closure: Emergent Organizations and their Dynamics , Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 901: 42-53. Gabora, L.: 2000, 'From Double Aspect Theory to Human Consciousness', Consciousness and Cognition 9 (2): S78. Gabora, L.: 2002, ' Amplifying Phenomenal Information: Toward a Fundamental Theory of Human Consciousness', to appear in Journal of Consciousness Studies . [adap-org/9911003] Gabora, L. 'Origin of the Modern Mind through Conceptual Closure', submitted. Gabora, L. & Aerts, D.: 2000, Distilling the Essence of an Evolutionary Process, and Implications for a Formal Description of Culture', in W. Kistler (ed.), Proceedings of Center for Human Evolution Workshop 5: Cultural Evolution, May 2000, Foundation for the Future. Gabora, L. & Aerts, D.: 2002a, 'Contextualizing Concepts', Proceedings of the 15th International FLAIRS Conference (Special Track "Categorization and Concept Representation: Models and Implications"), Pensacola, Florida, May 16-18, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, 148-152. Gabora, L. & Aerts, D.: 2002, 'Contextualizing Concepts using a Mathematical Generalization of the Quantum Formalism', to appear in special issue of Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence on concepts and categories. Godfrey-Smith, P.: 2000, 'The Replicator in Retrospect', Biology and Philosophy 15 , 403-423. Hancock, P. J. B., Smith, L. S. & Phillips, W. A.: 1991, 'A Biologically Supported Error-Correcting Learning Rule', Neural Computation3(2): 201-212. Hebb, D. O.: 1949, The Organization of Behavior, Wiley, New York. Heyes, C. M.: 1998, 'Theory of mind in nonhuman primates', Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21(1), 104-134. Hinton, G.E., McClelland, J.L. & Rumelhart, D.E.: 1986, 'Distributed representations'. In: Rumelhart D.E., McClelland J.L., and the PDP research Group (eds.), Parallel Distributed Processing 1: 77-109, MIT Press, Cambridge MA. Hofbauer, J. & Sigmund, K.: 1988a, The Theory of Evolution and Dynamical Systems, Cambridge University Press , Cambridge, UK. Hull D. L.: 1988a, Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Hull, D. L.: 1988b, 'Interactors versus Vehicles', in: H. C. Plotkin (ed.), The Role of Behavior in Evolution, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Hull, D. L., Langman, R. E., & Glenn, S. S.: 2001, 'A General Account of Selection: Biology, Immunology, and Behavior', Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24(3), 511-573. Karmiloff-Smith, A.: 1990, 'Constraints on Representational Change: Evidence from Children's Drawing', Cognition 34: 57-83. Karmiloff-Smith, A.: 1992, Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science, MIT Press, Cambridge MA. Kauffman, S. A.: 1993, Origins of Order, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK. Kauffman, S. A.: 1999, ' Darwinism, neoDarwinism, and the autocatalytic model of culture : Commentary on Origin of Culture by Liane Gabora', Psycoloquy 10(22): 1-4. Kruschke, J. K.: 1993, Human category learning: Implications for backpropagation models'. Connection Science 5: 3-36. Lake, M.: 1998, 'Digging for Memes: The Role of Material Objects in Cultural Evolution', in C. Renfrew & C. Scarre (eds.), Cognition and Material Culture: The Archeology of Symbolic Storage, McDonald Institute Monographs, pp. 77-88. Lee, D. H., Granja, J. R., Martinez J. A., Severin, K. & Ghadiri, M. R.: 1996, 'A Self-Replicating Peptide', Nature 382(8) August, 525-528. Lee, D., Severin, K., Yokobayashi & Ghadiri, M.: 1997, 'Emergence of Symbiosis in Peptide Self-replication through a Hypercyclic Network', Nature 390(11) December, 591-594. Lewontin, R. C.: 1991, Biology as Ideology, Harper, New York. Lorenz, K.: 1971, Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Lumsden, C. & Wilson, E.: 1981, Genes,Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Marr, D.: 1969, 'A Theory of the Cerebellar Cortex', Journal of Physiology 202: 437-470. Marsden, P.: 2001, 'Copycat Terrorism: Fanning the Fire', Journal of Memetics 5. Metcalfe, J. S.: 2001, 'Consumption, Preferences, and the Evolutionary Agenda', Journal of Evolutionary Economics 11(1): 37-58. Mithen, S.: 1998, 'A creative explosion? Theory of mind, language, and the disembodied mind of the Upper Paleolithic'. In: Creativity in Human Evolution and Prehistory, ed. S. Mithen, Routledge. Morowitz, H. J.: 1992, The Beginnings of Cellular Life, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Nanay, B.: 2002, 'The Return of the Replicator: What is Philosophically Significant in a General Account of Replication and Selection?', Biology and Philosophy 171: 9-121. Oparin, A. I.: 1971, 'Routes for the Origin of the First Forms of Life', Subcellular and Cellular Biochemistry 1(75). Palm, G.: 1980, 'On Associative memory'. Biological Cybernetics 36: 19-31. Piaget, J.: 1936/52, The Origin of Intelligence in Children, International Universities Press. Plotkin, H.: 1997, Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Popper, K.: 1963, Conjectures and Refutations, Routledge, London. Rivkin, J. W.: 2001, 'Reproducing Knowledge: Replication without Imitation at Moderate Complexity', Organizational Science 12(3): 274-293. Saviotti, P. P. & Mani, G. S.: 1995, 'Competition, Variety, and Technological Evolution: A Replicator Dynamics Model', Journal of Evolutionary Economics 5(4): 369-392. Schuster, P. & Sigmund, K.: 1983, Replicator Dynamics', Journal of Theoretical Biology 100: 533-38. Severin, K., Lee, D. H., Kennan, A. J. & Ghadiri, M. R.: 1997, 'A Synthetic Peptide Ligase', Nature 389: 16 October, 706-709. Sims, C.: 1991, Artificial Evolution for Computer Graphics, Computer Graphics 25(4), 325-327. Smolensky, P.: 1988, 'On the proper treatment of connectionism'. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11: 1-43. Sober, E. & Wilson, D. S.: 1994, 'A Critical Review of Philosophical Work on the Units of Selection Problem', Philosophy of Science 49: 157-180. Spector, L. & Luke, S: 1996a, 'Culture Enhances the Evolvability of Cognition', in Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, G. Cottrell (ed.), Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 672-677. Spector, L. & Luke, S: 1996b, 'Cultural Transmission of Information in Genetic Programming', in Genetic Programming 1996: Proceedings of the First Annual Conference, J. R. Koza, D. E. Goldberg, D. B. Fogel, and R. L. Riolo (eds.), MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 209-214. Sperber, D.: 1996, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford. Sporns, O., Gally, J. A., Reeke, G. N. Jr., & Edelman, G. M.: 1989, 'Reentrant Signalling among Simulated Neuronal Groups leads to Coherency in their Oscillatory Activity', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 86: 7265-7269. Sporns, O., Tonini, G., & Edelman, G. M.: 1991, 'Modeling Perceptual Grouping and Figure-Ground Segregation by Means of Active Reentrant Connections', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 88: 129-133. Sterelny, K.: 2000, 'Looking after number one', Biology and Philosophy 15(2): 275-289. Sterelny, K. Smith, K., & Dickison, M.: 1996, 'The Extended Replicator', Biology and Philosophy 11: 377-403. Tomasello, M.: 2000, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, MIT Press, Cambridge MA. Tonini, G., Sporns, O., Edelman, G. M.: 1992, 'Reentry and the Problem of Integrating Multiple Cortical Areas: Simulation of Dynamic Integration in the Visual System', Cerebellar Cortex 2: 310-335. Von Neumann, J.: 1966, Theory of Self-reproducing Automata, University of Illinois Press, Champaign. Witt, U.: 1992, 'Evolutionary Concepts in Economics', Eastern Economic Journal 18: 405-419. citation: Gabora, Dr. Liane (2004) Ideas are not replicators but minds are. [Journal (Paginated)] document_url: http://cogprints.org/3418/1/Gabora2004IdeasAreNotReplicatorsMindsAre.pdf document_url: http://cogprints.org/3418/2/replicator.html