Mutation and Recombination

Rosie’s lecture got me thinking about my interest in the evolution of imagination, and whether it is useful to postulate ideas or memes as independent of the minds of thier hosts. Bascially, I want to test how far this metaphor can stretch, while remaining critical it might burst.

In genetics, mutations are changes within an individual, like typos in base pairs when DNA polymerase and other repair enzymes fail to spot and fix them. The rate of mutation tends to be very low, a balance between perfect copying and the physiological cost of preventing them.

Recombination of genes happens between (sexual) individuals and no one has yet been able to come up with a good theory of why it occurs when this process does more harm than good in mathematical modelling.

One of the main criticisms of the meme concept is that culture cannot be examined in bits or composed of independent units. But like religion, culture must be made up of something. Even genes do not “work” in isolation, so we should not expect memes to either. Genes used to be fuzzy and invisible too, before we could observe DNA and chromosomes; they are useful theoretical artifacts because when a sequence gets knocked out, it has some observable effect. But can a meme be knocked out and shed light on culture? Not likely.

So what would a meme be, physically? A sequence of neural connections or pattern of activity?

How would a meme mutate or recombine? Does it have fidelity, fecundity, and stability (longetivity)?

In Conceptural Integration Theory (CIT, also known as mental space theory), developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, a set of activated neuronal assemblies are momentarily marked off in a so called “mental space” (imagine a circle with a realistic painting of a woman as the neural pattern, composed of various parts such as head, neck, torso, color, shape, light, etc. and another circle with an African mask as the pattern, also composed of various parts such as head, shape, light, etc.), and the patterns in each space are run together in a simulated new “blended space” (imagine a new circle with Picasso’s famous painting Ladies of Avignon. This is a very crude example, but you get the idea.) Basically, the this theory looks vaguely like a venn diagram using concept maps. It has been critiqued for being fairly empirically untestable so far.

The mental spaces are short term, constructed via information stored in longer term memory networks and associations. In the example of the expression “digging one’s own financial grave,” there is the creation of two maps or “mental spaces” for the domains Grave Digging and Financial Failure, respectively. In each space, there are association networks such as Gravedigger, corpse, and death for “Grave Digging” and the unawareness of consequences, suffering, bad decisions for “Financial Failure” which are blended in a new space to make meaning of the metaphor (Slingerland 2008:178, 186). Blending allows us to conceive of “As if” scenarios, and build upon them, ideas upon ideas, memes spawning more memes.

What I want to ask, is whether this blending is similar to recombination or mutation.

A meme would be a neural pattern that codes for something very simple in a larger association network, such as the shape of a head or an eye, or changes in pitch or the identification and categorization of nouns, verbs, etc. A cluster of memes would code for all kinds of stylistic representations, images of familiar symbols, tunes and story plots. Blending creates new memes, which may be selected for or against depending on the frequency of other memes. For example, if my network of memes related to funerals included links to dark colors, grief, pain, images of dull skies, tears were to suddenly encounter links to funeral jokes, laughter, bright skies, and ritual dancing, there would be competition in terms of the strength of those connections, which links I activate more than others (weak links eventually become extinct), and these depend on the strength of the input signals which I recieve from the larger cultural meme pool. In that way, memes can be said to be independent from their hosts.

There is no blending without input into two or more “mental spaces”. Input must come from past experience and stimuli from other minds, from a memetic environment or community (like a gene pool?). These spaces (chromosomes?) “cross over” in some sense, and elements are thrown away in the process, but it is not reassembled between “two individual hosts” but in the same mind, which then can be communicated to another, etc. New ideas are often intentional, not mistakes in copying, so they don’t really “mutate” in the same sense.

Mutation happens when mistakes are made communicating between minds. It takes a long time to learn how to replicate a letter, to teach a child to write, and reproduce recognizable symbols with stability and fidelity. It takes an even longer time to copy a pattern for a fictional character, which includes all the past experiences, thoughts, feelings, actions, associations, friendships, events, yadda, yadda of that charcter (passed orally or textually, and is prone to mistakes, but there is some stability that there is agreement on someone named Anne of Green Gables or Harry Potter). Sounds may be misheard, but there is enough stability that we can trace those shifts most of the time. Instructions may be lost and the product or technology is left behind for reverse engineering. Nevertheless, there appears to be a certain rate of mutation that makes some memes more fit than others when phemotypically expressed in a cultural artefact, like some tunes that we can’t get rid of, or the ubiquitous smily face.

What does it mean for ideas to mutuate, recombine or blend? Is culture like an organism? Is this a useful metaphor?