Ideas are not replicators but minds are
By Liane Gabora. 2004
85 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computational Theory and Mathematics, Cultural Studies
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d484a01c85ac79a6989dcfce65745358e7783668
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Citations in the corpus
- Creative Thought as a non Darwinian Evolutionary Process (2005, background): “Thus it can be argued that the mind constitutes a 'primitive replicator', similar to the self-organized autocatalytic sets postulated to be the earliest forms of life in that it is un-coded and therefore subject to inheritance of acquired characteristics (Gabora 2004).”