See also Derek
Gatherer's own site
Derek
Gatherer has a B.Sc. in Genetics from the University of Glasgow (1986), and
a Ph.D. from Imperial College
School of Medicine, London
(1991). His post-doctoral career took him to Quito,
Warwick, to Cambridge, where he was a Research
Associate of Corpus Christi College for 18 months, to Liverpool John Moores
University where he was Lecturer in Molecular Genetics in the School
of Biomolecular Sciences, and to
the University of Glasgow, Division
of Virology.
Like many others, his interest
in memetics dates from reading 'The Selfish Gene' as an undergraduate,
but he has been seriously involved in memetics since
about 1993. He also maintains his previous research
interest in molecular evolution and the statistical properties of DNA, and
has developed a gene-finding algorithm for use in genome projects (work
in collaboration with Dr. Neil R. McEwan, Rowett Research Institute, Aberdeen).
Published papers
on memetics and related areas
These
articles are listed in the order in which they were written rather than the
order in which they were (or will be) published.
- Gatherer
D (1998) Meme pools, World 3 and Averroës’s vision
of immortality. Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science
33, 203-219.
This
article dates from my time in Cambridge,
and spent three years or more in the preparation, review and publication processes.
It reflects the Popperian
view of memetics that I had at that time, and attempts
to fuse that to the work of Dennett and the 12th century Spanish philosopher
Averroës, whose 800th death-anniversary falls in 1998.
for those with access to Journals Online, this article
is now available online. Just follow the instructions from the Journals Online
homepage
- Gatherer
D (1997) Feyerabend, Dawkins and the politics of cultural diversity.
Anarchist Studies
5, 23-43.
Here
I attempt to draw a parallel between cultural diversity and genetic diversity
in ecosystems. Since species with low genetic diversity are very prone to extinction
on sudden environmental change, I argue that culturally uniform societies are
also liable to social disintegration under conditions of rapidly changing environmental
circumstances (meaning both the 'natural' environment and the interaction with
surrounding cultures). Since Western culture is both obliterating small indigenous
cultures and also becoming more uniform within itself,
the possibility of a 'cultural extinction event' is discussed. The work of the
philosopher Paul Feyerabend is relevant in this context,
since he has previously argued that scientific progress benefits from a plurality
of theories and approaches.
Memetics
is often regarded as a 'new' science, but intimations of its arrival are found
in many previous schools of thought. Here I review some of these proto-memetic ideas, and show how memetics
provides some common ground for separated branches of the Western intellectual
tradition.
Cultural
change is often explained by the process of dialectics (not infrequently in
a Marxist form). This paper takes music as a model system and asks whether the
cultural evolutionary approach can explain its historical development better
than dialectics. The conclusion is that both methods provide insights into different
aspects of cultural history. Dialectics is better where the 'big picture' is
considered, whereas more obviously evolutionary change can be seen at lower
levels. The question of how short-term evolutionary mechanisms might create
the impression of dialectical processes on the grander scale remains open.
- Gatherer
D (1999) The memetics of design. In:
Bentley P (ed.) Evolutionary Design by Computers. Academic Press (in press).
This
is a chapter from Peter
Bentley's forthcoming anthology on the application of evolutionary methods
to human creativity.
- Gatherer
D and McEwan NR (1998) On units of
selection in cultural evolution. Journal
of Theoretical Biology, 192, 409-413.
A
brief tussle with Michael Best
and Richard Pocklington over the size of the units
of selection in cultural evolution. At what point does the memetic 'nucleotide level' become the 'meme level'? Pocklington and Best say low, we say high. Their reply is
in press in Journal of Theoretical Biology. For those with access to Idealibrary, this article is now online. Just follow the instructions
from the Idealibrary homepage.
- Gatherer
D and Manning FCR (1998)
Correlation of examination performance with lecture attendance: a comparative
study of first year biological sciences undergraduates. Biochemical Education
26, 121-124.
When
we speak of the transmission of memes, we enter territory in which educational
psychologists have been working for many years. Our work suggests that undergraduates
do not necessarily improve their exam performance by attending lectures, unless
English is their second language or they are from an ethnic minority, in which
case the face-to-face method produces striking improvement in the fidelity of
transmission of ideas.
The
official record holder for the longest period in review for JoM.
Here I argue that the reason memetics has shown little
empirical progress in the last 20 years is that the idea of a meme as a replicating
unit of information inside a brain, or as any abstract internal mental content,
is too intangible to provide raw material for analysis or experimentation. A
cultural evolutionary theory needs cultural replicators, but these are only detectable in the real world
as artefacts and behaviours.
This means that the meme-host dichotomy and the notion of 'mind viruses' are
scientific dead-ends.
