Is there a scientific research program in memetics?
The case of bird songs
Keywords:
Meme, Cultural Evolution, Research program, Natural Selection, Cultural Traditions in Birds
Abstract
Memetics is an approach to cultural evolution that has been the focus of much discussion and has attracted criticism of various kinds in recent decades. The purpose of our paper is to investigate whether, beyond the existing criticisms and defenses, there exists at present any research program that can be adequately characterized as memetic. We will focus, specifically, on the field of the study of the cultural evolution of bird songs, since some authors have used the word "meme" to refer to the cultural items under study. However, not all use the word, since, probably due to its controversial nature, it has fallen into disuse. This implies that to fulfill the objective of our work we cannot appeal to bibliometric analyses. For this reason, we will elucidate the different senses in which memetics can be characterized. Our objective is to defend that in the area of bird songs we can find research that responds to the memetic perspective in all the above-mentioned senses.
References
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Aunger, Robert (2006). «What’s the Matter with Memes». En: Richard Dawkins. How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, editado por Alan Grafen y Mark Ridley. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 176–88.
Baker, Myron C. (1996). «Depauperate Meme Pool of Vocal Signals in an Island Population of Singing Honeyeaters». Animal Behaviour 51, no. 4: pp. 853–58. doi: https://doi.org/10.1006/anbe.1996.0089
Baker, Myron C. y Gammon, David E. (2008). «Vocal Memes in Natural Populations of Chickadees: Why Do Some Memes Persist and Others Go Extinct?». Animal Behaviour 75, no. 1: pp. 279–89. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2007.05.022.
Blackmore, Susan (2000). The meme machine. Nueva York: Oxford Paperbacks.
Burman, Jeremy T. (2012). «The Misunderstanding of Memes: Biography of an Unscientific Object, 1976–1999». Perspectives on Science 20, no. 1: pp. 75–104. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/POSC_a_00057.
Claidière, Nicolas; Scott-Phillips, Thomas C. y Sperber, Dan (2014). «How Darwinian is cultural evolution?». Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 369, no. 1642: pp. 20130368–20130368. doi: http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0368.
Crates, Ross; Langmore, Naomi; Ranjard, Louis; Stojanovic, Dejan; Rayner, Laura; Ingwersen, Dean y Heinsohn Robert (2021). «Loss of vocal culture and fitness costs in a critically endangered songbird». Proceedings of the Royal Society B 288, no. 1947: pp. 20210225–20210225. doi: http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.0225.
Dawkins, Richard (1976). The Selfish Gene. Nueva York: Oxford University Press.
Dawkins, Richard (1983). «Universal Darwinism». En: Evolution from Molecules to Men, editado por Derek S. Bendall. Nueva York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 403–425.
Dawkins, Richard (1989). The selfish gene (New ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
de Chadarevian, Soraya (2007). «The Selfish Gene at 30: The Origin and Career of a Book and Its Title». Notes and Records of the Royal Society 61, no. 1: pp. 31–38. doi: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2006.0162.
Dennett, Daniel C. (1996). Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. Nueva York: Simon and Schuster.
Dennett, Daniel C. (2006). Breaking the spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon. Nueva York: Penguin.
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Ginnobili, Santiago (2018). La teoría de la selección natural – Una exploración metacientífica. Bernal: EDUNQ.
Ginnobili, Santiago y Roffé, Ariel J. (2017). «Dos usos de los modelos de optimalidad en las explicaciones por selección natural». Metatheoria – Revista De Filosofía E Historia De La Ciencia 8, no. 1: pp. 43–55. doi: https://doi.org/10.48160/18532330me8.161.
Gordillo Martínez, Alejandro; Ortiz Ramírez, Marco Fabio y Navarro, Adolfo (2013). «Estructura y evolución de las vocalizaciones de las aves». Revista Ciencias UNAM n° 109-110.
Grafen, Alan (2006). «The Intellectual Contribution of The Selfish Gene to Evolutionary Theory». En: Richard Dawkins. How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, editado por Alan Grafen y Mark Ridley. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 66–74.
Hofhuis, Steije T. y Boudry, Maarten (2019). «'Viral' Hunts?: A Cultural Darwinian Analysis of Witch Persecutions». Cultural Science Journal 11, no. 1, pp. 13–29. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/csci.116.
Jenkins, Peter F. (1978). «Cultural Transmission of Song Patterns and Dialect Development in a Free-Living Bird Population». Animal Behaviour 26, no. 1: pp. 50–78. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/0003-3472(78)90007-6.
Kendal, Rachel L.; Coolen, Isabelle.; van Bergen, Yfke y Laland, Kevin N. (2005). «Trade-offs in the adaptive use of social and asocial learning». Advances in the Study of Behavior 35, pp. 333–379. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-3454(05)35008-X.
Kuhn, Thomas S. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. London: University of Chicago Press.
Kuper, Adam (2000). «If Memes are the Answer, What is the Question?». En: Darwinizing Culture editado por Robert Aunger. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 175–188.
Laland, Kevin N. y Williams, Kerry (1998). «Social transmission of maladaptive information in the guppy». Behavioral Ecology 9, no. 5, pp. 493–499.
Lewens, Tim (2015). Cultural evolution: conceptual challenges. Oxford: Oxford Uuniversity Press.
Lewens, Tim (2020). «Cultural Evolution». En: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition) editado por Edward N. Zalta. URL =
Luther, David y Baptista, Luis (2010). «Urban Noise and the Cultural Evolution of Bird Songs». Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 277, no. 1680: pp. 469–73. doi: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2009.1571.
Lynch, Alejandro; Plunkett, Geoffrey M.; Baker Allan J. y Jenkins Peter F. (1989). «A Model of Cultural Evolution of Chaffinch Song Derived with the Meme Concept». The American Naturalist 133, no. 5, pp. 634–653. doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/284942.
Lynch, Alejandro y Baker, Allan J. (1994). «A Population Memetics Approach To Cultural Evolution In Chaffinch Song: Differentiation Among Populations». Evolution 48, no. 2: pp. 351-359. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1558-5646.1994.tb01316.x.
Lynch, Alejandro y Baker Allan J. (1986). «Congruence of morphometric and cultural evolution in Atlantic island chaffinch populations». Canadian Journal of Zoology 64, no. 7: pp. 1576–1580. doi: https://doi.org/10.1139/z86-236.
Lynch, Alejandro y Baker Allan J. (1993). «A Population Memetics Approach to Cultural Evolution in Chaffinch Song: Meme Diversity Within Populations». The American Naturalist 141, no. 4, pp. 597–620. doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/285493.
Lynch, Alenjandro (1996). «The Population Memetics of Birdsong». En: Ecology and Evolution of Acoustic Communication in Birds editado por Donald E. Kroodsma y Edward H. Miller. Ithaca y Londres: Cornell University Press, pp. 181–97.
Marler, Peter y Tamura, Miwako (1964). «Culturally Transmitted Patterns of Vocal Behavior in Sparrows». Science 146, no. 3650: pp. 1483–1486. doi: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.146.3650.1483.
Mesoudi, Alex (2011). Cultural evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. doi:https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226520452.
Mesoudi, Alex y Thornton, Alex (2018). «What Is Cumulative Cultural Evolution?». Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 285, no. 1880. doi: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.0712.
Mundinger, Paul C. (1980). «Animal Cultures and a General Theory of Cultural Evolution». Ethology and Sociobiology 1, no. 3: pp. 183–223. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/0162-3095(80)90008-4.
Nottebohm, Fernando (1970). «Ontogeny of Bird Song». Science 167, no. 3920: pp. 950–956. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1728208.
Rendell, L.; Boyd, R.; Cownden, D.; Enquist, M.; Eriksson, K.; Feldman, M. W.; Fogarty, L.; Ghirlanda, S.; Lillycrap, T y Laland, K. N. (2010). «Why copy others? Insights from the social learning strategies tournament». Science 328, no. 5975: pp. 208–213. doi: https://doi.org/10.1126/Science.1184719.
Richerson, Peter J. y Boyd, Robert (2005). Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. Londres: The University of Chicago Press.
Roffé, Ariel J. (2017) «Genetic drift as a directional factor: biasing effects and a priori predictions». Biology & Philosophy 32: pp. 535–558. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9575-1.
Roffé, Ariel J. y Ginnobili, Santiago (2020) «Optimality Models and the Propensity Interpretation of Fitness». Acta Biotheoretica 68: pp. 367–385. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-019-09369-5.
Shifman, Limor (2013). «Memes in a digital world: Reconciling with a conceptual troublemaker». Journal of computer-mediated communication 18, no. 3: pp. 362–377. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12013.
Sperber, Dan (2000). «An Objection to the Memetic Approach to Culture». En: Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics editado por Rober Aunger. Nueva York: Oxford University Press.
Thorpe, William H. (1958) «The Learning Of Song Patterns By Birds, With Especial Reference To The Song Of The Chaffinch Fringilla coelebs». Ibis 100, no. 4: pp. 535–570. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1474-919X.1958.tb07960.x.
Youngblood, Mason. y Lahti, David (2018) «A bibliometric analysis of the interdisciplinary field of cultural evolution». Palgrave Communications 4, no. 1: pp.1–9. doi: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-018-0175-8.
Aplin, Lucy M. (2019). «Culture and Cultural Evolution in Birds: A Review of the Evidence». Animal Behaviour 147: pp. 179–187. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2018.05.001.
Aunger, Robert (2006). «What’s the Matter with Memes». En: Richard Dawkins. How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, editado por Alan Grafen y Mark Ridley. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 176–88.
Baker, Myron C. (1996). «Depauperate Meme Pool of Vocal Signals in an Island Population of Singing Honeyeaters». Animal Behaviour 51, no. 4: pp. 853–58. doi: https://doi.org/10.1006/anbe.1996.0089
Baker, Myron C. y Gammon, David E. (2008). «Vocal Memes in Natural Populations of Chickadees: Why Do Some Memes Persist and Others Go Extinct?». Animal Behaviour 75, no. 1: pp. 279–89. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2007.05.022.
Blackmore, Susan (2000). The meme machine. Nueva York: Oxford Paperbacks.
Burman, Jeremy T. (2012). «The Misunderstanding of Memes: Biography of an Unscientific Object, 1976–1999». Perspectives on Science 20, no. 1: pp. 75–104. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/POSC_a_00057.
Claidière, Nicolas; Scott-Phillips, Thomas C. y Sperber, Dan (2014). «How Darwinian is cultural evolution?». Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 369, no. 1642: pp. 20130368–20130368. doi: http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0368.
Crates, Ross; Langmore, Naomi; Ranjard, Louis; Stojanovic, Dejan; Rayner, Laura; Ingwersen, Dean y Heinsohn Robert (2021). «Loss of vocal culture and fitness costs in a critically endangered songbird». Proceedings of the Royal Society B 288, no. 1947: pp. 20210225–20210225. doi: http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.0225.
Dawkins, Richard (1976). The Selfish Gene. Nueva York: Oxford University Press.
Dawkins, Richard (1983). «Universal Darwinism». En: Evolution from Molecules to Men, editado por Derek S. Bendall. Nueva York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 403–425.
Dawkins, Richard (1989). The selfish gene (New ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
de Chadarevian, Soraya (2007). «The Selfish Gene at 30: The Origin and Career of a Book and Its Title». Notes and Records of the Royal Society 61, no. 1: pp. 31–38. doi: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2006.0162.
Dennett, Daniel C. (1996). Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. Nueva York: Simon and Schuster.
Dennett, Daniel C. (2006). Breaking the spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon. Nueva York: Penguin.
Dennett, Daniel C. (2017). From bacteria to Bach and back: The evolution of minds. Nueva York: WW Norton & Company.
Edmonds, Bruce (2005). «The revealed poverty of the gene-meme analogy – why memetics per se has failed to produce substantive results». Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission 9. http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/2005/vol9/edmonds_b.html
Fehér, Olga; Wang, Haibir; Saar, Sigal; Mitra, Parta P. y Tchernichovski, Ofer (2009). «De novo establishment of wild-type song culture in the zebra finch». Nature 459: pp. 564–568. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature07994.
Ginnobili, Santiago (2018). La teoría de la selección natural – Una exploración metacientífica. Bernal: EDUNQ.
Ginnobili, Santiago y Roffé, Ariel J. (2017). «Dos usos de los modelos de optimalidad en las explicaciones por selección natural». Metatheoria – Revista De Filosofía E Historia De La Ciencia 8, no. 1: pp. 43–55. doi: https://doi.org/10.48160/18532330me8.161.
Gordillo Martínez, Alejandro; Ortiz Ramírez, Marco Fabio y Navarro, Adolfo (2013). «Estructura y evolución de las vocalizaciones de las aves». Revista Ciencias UNAM n° 109-110.
Grafen, Alan (2006). «The Intellectual Contribution of The Selfish Gene to Evolutionary Theory». En: Richard Dawkins. How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, editado por Alan Grafen y Mark Ridley. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 66–74.
Hofhuis, Steije T. y Boudry, Maarten (2019). «'Viral' Hunts?: A Cultural Darwinian Analysis of Witch Persecutions». Cultural Science Journal 11, no. 1, pp. 13–29. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/csci.116.
Jenkins, Peter F. (1978). «Cultural Transmission of Song Patterns and Dialect Development in a Free-Living Bird Population». Animal Behaviour 26, no. 1: pp. 50–78. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/0003-3472(78)90007-6.
Kendal, Rachel L.; Coolen, Isabelle.; van Bergen, Yfke y Laland, Kevin N. (2005). «Trade-offs in the adaptive use of social and asocial learning». Advances in the Study of Behavior 35, pp. 333–379. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-3454(05)35008-X.
Kuhn, Thomas S. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. London: University of Chicago Press.
Kuper, Adam (2000). «If Memes are the Answer, What is the Question?». En: Darwinizing Culture editado por Robert Aunger. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 175–188.
Laland, Kevin N. y Williams, Kerry (1998). «Social transmission of maladaptive information in the guppy». Behavioral Ecology 9, no. 5, pp. 493–499.
Lewens, Tim (2015). Cultural evolution: conceptual challenges. Oxford: Oxford Uuniversity Press.
Lewens, Tim (2020). «Cultural Evolution». En: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition) editado por Edward N. Zalta. URL =
Luther, David y Baptista, Luis (2010). «Urban Noise and the Cultural Evolution of Bird Songs». Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 277, no. 1680: pp. 469–73. doi: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2009.1571.
Lynch, Alejandro; Plunkett, Geoffrey M.; Baker Allan J. y Jenkins Peter F. (1989). «A Model of Cultural Evolution of Chaffinch Song Derived with the Meme Concept». The American Naturalist 133, no. 5, pp. 634–653. doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/284942.
Lynch, Alejandro y Baker, Allan J. (1994). «A Population Memetics Approach To Cultural Evolution In Chaffinch Song: Differentiation Among Populations». Evolution 48, no. 2: pp. 351-359. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1558-5646.1994.tb01316.x.
Lynch, Alejandro y Baker Allan J. (1986). «Congruence of morphometric and cultural evolution in Atlantic island chaffinch populations». Canadian Journal of Zoology 64, no. 7: pp. 1576–1580. doi: https://doi.org/10.1139/z86-236.
Lynch, Alejandro y Baker Allan J. (1993). «A Population Memetics Approach to Cultural Evolution in Chaffinch Song: Meme Diversity Within Populations». The American Naturalist 141, no. 4, pp. 597–620. doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/285493.
Lynch, Alenjandro (1996). «The Population Memetics of Birdsong». En: Ecology and Evolution of Acoustic Communication in Birds editado por Donald E. Kroodsma y Edward H. Miller. Ithaca y Londres: Cornell University Press, pp. 181–97.
Marler, Peter y Tamura, Miwako (1964). «Culturally Transmitted Patterns of Vocal Behavior in Sparrows». Science 146, no. 3650: pp. 1483–1486. doi: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.146.3650.1483.
Mesoudi, Alex (2011). Cultural evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. doi:https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226520452.
Mesoudi, Alex y Thornton, Alex (2018). «What Is Cumulative Cultural Evolution?». Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 285, no. 1880. doi: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.0712.
Mundinger, Paul C. (1980). «Animal Cultures and a General Theory of Cultural Evolution». Ethology and Sociobiology 1, no. 3: pp. 183–223. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/0162-3095(80)90008-4.
Nottebohm, Fernando (1970). «Ontogeny of Bird Song». Science 167, no. 3920: pp. 950–956. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1728208.
Rendell, L.; Boyd, R.; Cownden, D.; Enquist, M.; Eriksson, K.; Feldman, M. W.; Fogarty, L.; Ghirlanda, S.; Lillycrap, T y Laland, K. N. (2010). «Why copy others? Insights from the social learning strategies tournament». Science 328, no. 5975: pp. 208–213. doi: https://doi.org/10.1126/Science.1184719.
Richerson, Peter J. y Boyd, Robert (2005). Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. Londres: The University of Chicago Press.
Roffé, Ariel J. (2017) «Genetic drift as a directional factor: biasing effects and a priori predictions». Biology & Philosophy 32: pp. 535–558. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9575-1.
Roffé, Ariel J. y Ginnobili, Santiago (2020) «Optimality Models and the Propensity Interpretation of Fitness». Acta Biotheoretica 68: pp. 367–385. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-019-09369-5.
Shifman, Limor (2013). «Memes in a digital world: Reconciling with a conceptual troublemaker». Journal of computer-mediated communication 18, no. 3: pp. 362–377. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12013.
Sperber, Dan (2000). «An Objection to the Memetic Approach to Culture». En: Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics editado por Rober Aunger. Nueva York: Oxford University Press.
Thorpe, William H. (1958) «The Learning Of Song Patterns By Birds, With Especial Reference To The Song Of The Chaffinch Fringilla coelebs». Ibis 100, no. 4: pp. 535–570. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1474-919X.1958.tb07960.x.
Youngblood, Mason. y Lahti, David (2018) «A bibliometric analysis of the interdisciplinary field of cultural evolution». Palgrave Communications 4, no. 1: pp.1–9. doi: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-018-0175-8.
Published
2021-12-30
How to Cite
[1]
León, M., Gimenez, I., Roffé, A.J., Bernabé, F.N. and Ginnobili, S. 2021. Is there a scientific research program in memetics? The case of bird songs. Disputatio. 10, 19 (Dec. 2021), 15-45. DOI:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5759272.
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