I’m on the early stages of a master’s thesis on memetics (and the sociology of religion, FWIW), however belated and even wasteful this might turn out to be. One of the most common critiques of memetics I find, is the lack of a memetic equivalent to DNA, with discrete units at specific loci, and with alleles and whatnot. In defense, mention is often made of the fact that natural selection was a most progressive research program in biology even for the nearly hundred years between Origin of the Species and the discovery of DNA, even though Darwin’s assumptions regarding genes were supposedly very wrong. But alas, I haven’t found much on how research on evolution was done without knowledge of DNA, so my question is if anyone can either explain how this was done, or point me to some references? I’ve written memetics in parantheses in the subject because I do not wish to confine the answers to a discussion of methodology thought to be directly relevant to memetics, any description of pre-DNA Darwinian methodology are most welcome.
Before the identification of DNA as the genetic material and the discovery of the genetic code, evolutionary studies for the most part were based on the morphology of organisms (their physical characteristics). In some cases, behaviors were used as taxonomic characters. In either case, evolutionists were generally studying phenotypes, that is, the physical form produced by a particular genotype, rather than the genes themselves.
But similar phenotypes might be caused by entirely unrelated genes, or memes. While this is seen as a fatal flaw of memetics, early Darwinianism apparently did just fine in spite of this. While I admit that cultural phenomena probably are harder to group than biological ones because of higher mutation rates, complexity and what have you, they’ve been grouped into functionally adequate categories for a long time now, and I don’t see how memetics need higher standards in this regard than other sciences of culture. (I realise that you haven’t argued against what I’m defending here, however)
Depends on what you mean by “just fine.” While in general morphology has been found to correlate with genetic relatedness, genetic studies have also uncovered many previously unsuspected instances of convergence.
Thomas Hunt Morgan put forward a theory of the linear arrangement of the genes in the chromosome based on the frequency with which different mutations were inherited together or separately, long before the linkage between DNA and inheritance was shown.
Not that Wikipedia is necessarily a reliable source, but from the first 2 paragraphs here, it seems that the actual mechanism was regarded as a black box. The absence of an identifiable mechanism however has never been an impediment to speculation and theorizing. Over the centuries, entire disciplines have been created and perpetuated without anything resembling a firm foundation.
I would suggest that Jung’s ideas regarding a collective subconscious come pretty close to being a type of meme DNA. But since that’s not your question . . .
It is not uncommon that something is studied scientifically before the mechanism is discovered. Gravity is a good example. Newton concisely formulated his law with a mathematical formula but didn’t know how or why two bodies attracted each other. This “spooky action a distance” in fact has been something of a concern to science for a long time.
It depends. Sometimes, as with Newton, the conclusions are so obviously correct that the lack of a mechanism is not considered a fatal flaw. But mechanism exists at different levels. The idea of evolution was around for a long time (Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s grandfather was a strong advocate). What Charles did was find a mechanism–natural selection–at one level, without having any idea what the molecular mechanism was. (Actually molecules and atoms were highly suspect in Darwin’s era, although getting less so, but not finally accepted until Einstein’s paper on Brownian motion.) Then when Mendel’s work was rediscovered, there was a mechanism one level down–the idea of genes. Finally, DNA was discovered to be the carrier of genes as well as the mechanism of reproduction of genes.
I do believe in memes; I see too much irrationality that can be explained only so. But the mechanism is so different it is probably misleading to think of memetics as being in any useful way like genetics.