Martin, you are analyzing too deeply - maybe because of your enineering training. I could watch TV, do crosswords or Sudoku, play chess or golf, all of which are in general quite pointless, but you would presumably not question my motivation for doing so. I could alternatively hang out on 'warmist' blogs and indeed I do read many. I particularly enjoy ATTP, where the owner is humble about what he knows, the commenters are knowledgable, and the conversation generally tends towards understanding subjects, something I find wholly missing here. However, I have little to contribute to those discussions beyond saying "me too" where appropriate. That holds little interest.

Alternatively, I can discuss this interesting subject with you. And I'd really rather just discuss it, as I learn a lot in defending myself. But I feel that most people here don't want a discussion of the science, they want confirmation of their political position and anyone not offering that is a 'troll' to be insulted and driven away. I'd happily hit the reset, call a truce and be polite, but I doubt it would be very long before the first "you're an economic illiterate" accusation or "troll" name calling.

What applies to me applies also to you. Why do you spend your time here? Does your posting here serve any greater purpose than mine? You and other knowledgable posters must see many things written here that you know to be false (other than those from me) but whereas on ATTP and other warmist blogs other posters' errors are pointed promptly and accepted in good spirit, I see little of that here. That characteristic of this and similar blogs, perhaps more than anything, tells me there is no serious desire to understand or contribute to others' understanding, just a desire to oppose. The seeming inability of anyone to separate their opposition to climate science from their defense of fossil fuels just confirms that. I think your evident talents are wasted here. Your purpose would be served better by taking the argument to the opposition. If you really do know better than the whole of climate science then it should be possible to argue that logically and calmly (as you do here) over there. Try ATTP.

EM I be,I've Martin A described the energy imbalance which is an unmeasured, theoretical number, accurately as "bollocks". It may be right, just as I may pick the lottery numbers next weekend, but it remains a number derived from models which themselves are trying to model chaotic, non- linear processes. The most likely reason that Trenberth and Co. can't find the missing heat is that it's not missing but has returned to outer space to warm that particular heat sink by 10^-59C (or K). The numbers themselves are ridivulously small (0.65 W/m^) approximately 0.18% of the energy at the TOA. How much would te cloud albedo/soil absorption/ocean absorption/back radiation etc. have to vary to make that number wrong on a year by year basis? Do you know? Have you thought about it? (Or vice versa water vapour feedback?).

Geronimo

These are not small numbers. Our civilization's total energy budget is 10^13w. Our CO2 is leveraging much larger changes,

The imbalance is 10^21w.

The Earth's annual energy budget is 10^24w

The climate system's specific heat capacity is 10/^24w/C.

Geronimo

Sorry, wrong units. My 5.23 post should have read:-

These are not small numbers. Our civilization's total energy budget is 10^13joules Our CO2 is leveraging much larger changes,

The imbalance is 10^21joules

The Earth's annual energy budget is 10^24joules

The climate system's specific heat capacity is 10/^24joules/C.

Let's get back to the Nazis

Calling warmists Nazis MAY be a bit generous - Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in Gulag Archipelago was able to make a case that the Nazis had tortured a Russian about supposed transgrressions against the fatherland until their case against him fell through - they released him to Mother Russia where the State Security held it's own meetings with the man, torturing him until THEY decided their case was made and sentence him. Alexandr's point was that despite the notoriety of the Nazis they had some interest in the TRUTH. The Soviet SS - not so much

A State Security person - according to Solzhenitsyn - as much as admitted that they decide ahead of time whether you are guilty or innocent - No matter how long you hold to that innocence against torture and even where other facts support you, they WILL find you guilty. And if they've decided on your innocence and subsequent evidence points to your guilt, so be it, maybe next time, this was all decided at the start.

This is the general gist of a section of the Chapter entitle "BLUECAPS" in GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 1917-1956 Parts 1 & 2

Richard Drake: ‘Where's your evidence for the second oddity?’

The evidence is primarily the different way the two epithets are handled by climate sceptics, and specifically some blogs:

• The outrage and indignation of climate sceptics over the term ‘denier’ versus the easy acceptance or outright cheerleading for the term ‘Nazi’ and variants

• Explicit banning of a particular word (‘denier’) on Watts Up With That, probably the most-read climate sceptic website, while other terms are relegated to ‘other detritus’

• The quick recourse to the Nazi theme (see: The Merchants of Smear, WUWT) when it suits a polemical purpose.

These sorts of actions and reactions show a blunted sensitivity to the difference between the two terms: one of them denotes a group that engaged in genocide, the other denotes people who engage in post-hoc denial. The two terms are not at all equivalent.

Bendan H. There is a difference between what individuals should be able to get away with and what authority figures or organisations should be engaged in. So who cares if Mr Smith, acountant says compared to Mr Smith MP or Mr Smith plc?

Roy Spencer didn't say he was going to refer to all consensus supporters as Nazis, he indicated he'd had enough of being insulted and he was going to escalate the name calling. Some sceptics supported that, some didn't.

The main reason why those who want people to take AGW seriously should stop using 'denier' is because it annoys people they ultimately have to bring on side.

Originally I'd have said the Nazi jibe was pointless but since the Anti Defamation League have thrown their hat into the ring I've changed my mind. Shelley Rose, ADL Southeast Interim Regional Director probably never gave calling sceptics 'deniers' a second thought but the attention she and her organisation is currently getting might educate them somewhat.

Or maybe they'll be like every other idiot warmist and assume that the messages are sent from fossil fuelled paid shills.

Martin A : "I think we may be seeing the beginning of the end of the greatest mass delusion in human history..."

The social phenomenon of CAGW may or may not be entering the begining of the end (I am continually surprised by how little damage it has sustained after such a long lack of warming), but the memetic perspective (itself a particular lens of the cultural evolutionary perspective) says it cannot be a delusion. The social phenomenon of CAGW (by which distinction I leave out anything that may or may not be happening in the actual climate), works in exactly the same way that religions work, and indeed other secular memeplexes, plus there is a great deal of memetic drive in most extreme political systems and some philosophical systems too. We've co-evolved with these cultural entities essentially forever, and everyone is influenced by some memeplex or other, usually several, whether weak or strong. Hence, by definition, the whole population (including throughout the whole of history) cannot be under a delusion; this is instead a *normal* characteristic. We co-evolved with these entities because they provide a huge *net* benefit; in fact civilisation may not have arisen without them. But some cultural entities can be largely or wholly parasitical (in evolution, someone's profit is always someone else's dinner), and indeed CAGW is looking that way, hence there is net damage in such cases, and possibly large net damage. But throughout history and long before written history too, populations have been utterly soaked in memetically driven cultural entities, with some just as damaging as CAGW or indeed considerably worse. And there have even been entire civilistaions based on the culture of (false) climate prediction / control, so climate obsession as the cutural attractor is not at all new either. Far from being a unique or uniquely large social event in history, CAGW is one minor and completely unprecedented bump in the very many such bumps since we were homo-sapiens-sapiens and before, much like the temperature rise plus rate from 1975 to 1998 appears to be similarly outranked by any number of historic temperture bumps.

More detail than you're ever likely to need about how all the above works in a CAGW context is here:
http://wearenarrative.wordpress.com/2013/10/27/the-cagw-memeplex-a-cultural-creature/

Brendan H : likewise the same link if as John Shade suggests you might want to explore the memetic perspective.

P.S. the memetic perspective also explains the emphasis on language / name-calling, and why this swamps any factual stuff that might be going on; in memetic competition narrative success is rewarded more than verifiability (factual content).

ahhhhh.... above 'completely unprecedented' should be 'completely precedented', or indeed 'completely outranked'

TinyCO2: ‘There is a difference between what individuals should be able to get away with and what authority figures or organisations should be engaged in.’

That’s a very relevant point, and one I’ve alluded to in a previous post. Presumably, the attention given to Spencer’s statement is because of his status as a climate scientist.

But no man is an island, and people who occupy positions of authority are also ‘located’, as they say, in a social context, and tend to behave in accordance with that context. So in that sense, a regular and casualised invocation of a slur by the non-influential can enable the same in those who are presumed to speak for their group.

I agree that Spencer’s contribution may bring this issue to a head and perhaps cause people to dial down the angry tone, although I wouldn’t hold my breath given the reaction on all sides.

On a more general note, human behaviour is varied, but it’s also finite, as are the number of issues that confront any society. The Nazis were environmentalists? They also built motorways, tackled unemployment, tried to balance the books, engaged in diplomacy, etc. So the fact that some people might ‘act like’ Nazis or Holocaust deniers doesn’t mean much in itself.

What I think is happening in these food-fights over name-calling is that people are treating the moral issues surrounding climate as a proxy for the scientific claims and any resulting policy, with the aim of clawing their way to the top of the heap and claiming victory.

Andy, thanks for the link. I don’t know much about memes but I tend to be sceptical of universal theories that seem to try to explain too much. Contrary evidence is an obvious problem too, and the meme notion itself also seems to be highly reductionist, with individual organisms and social groups treated as mere carriers of cultural units.

Feb 28, 2014 at 7:39 AM | Brendan H:

"I tend to be sceptical of universal theories that seem to try to explain too much" Like evolution maybe ;) Memetics is (one of the theories of) evolution as applied to culture. I don't think there's too many folks left who don't think culture evolves. Similar to the CO2 debate, it's about the relative weight and interaction of the candidate mechanisms. I'm not sure what you mean by 'too much' in this context. It explains only what it explains, and is a highly useful insight that nevetheless is far from explaining everything. But that insight appears to be very good indeed at explaining social phenomena such a s religions for instance, and CAGW.

"Contrary evidence is an obvious problem too". I'd be interested what you have on that.

"...and the meme notion itself also seems to be highly reductionist, with individual organisms and social groups treated as mere carriers of cultural units." Well the latter part of that statement is not so in my understanding of memetics, in the sense that they are not *only* carriers of cultural units, so in your phrasing 'mere' would seem not to apply. I rather like Tim Taylors ('On Memetics' site) reply regarding reductionism:

'it's a basic scientific modeling technique to split thing up into pieces and analyze the pieces. It's called "reductionism" - and it is one of the most successful tools in the scientific toolkit. Nonetheless, some anthropologists apparently think that memeticists focus too much on the bits of culture, and not enough on how the bits interact. My way of framing this criticism (within the terminology of memetics) is that they are saying that memeticists focus too much on the memes, and not enough on meme contexts. By "meme context" I mean: everything else in the universe, apart from the meme in question. Memetics does pay some attention to meme contexts. There's memetic hitchhiking, memetic linkage, meme-gene coevolution, selection pressures, development - and other effects. However, I think that phrasing the criticism this way illustrates that there's a grain of truth to the accusation - and also suggests why meme contexts might be being somewhat neglected: they are large, complex and difficult to analyze.'

The main reason why those who want people to take AGW seriously should stop using 'denier' is because it annoys people they ultimately have to bring on side.

[..] Or maybe they'll be like every other idiot warmist and assume that the messages are sent from fossil fuelled paid shills.
Feb 27, 2014 at 12:40 PM | Unregistered CommenterTinyCO2

I can't disagree with that. I'm not a lot concerned about the use of the epithet. While it often comes from people who appear quite refractory to facts and reason, they are also often just enjoying having a good rant. Many of us do that from time to time.

But when politicians like Ed Milliband and Barack Obama give the impression that they are galloping down the same avenue it causes me a little bit of dismay. I've always been given to believe that professional politicians generally think it foolish to wilfully and directly insult sections of the electorate. Even if you imagine them to be fairly small in number, other sections of the electorate may not be impressed. (Yes, a small section will also be very pleased.)

But the dismay arises largely because these are people I might have voted for under other circumstances. Do they perhaps believe they are shoring up their core vote with such ill-informed and witless invective? I hope not. I can, and shall, vote elsewhere.

Feb 28, 2014 at 8:15 AM | Richard Drake

Amusing anecdote, but I don’t think it tells us anything much about anything, other than Gray’s rather clever invention of L. Revai (who I’d never heard of, and seems to be almost no refs to other than your Bryan Appleyard quote). Working on the principle of occam’s razor, I suspect influence, not prescience :) , perhaps Bryan was a little overawed when attributing the latter. Very clever chap, Gray, and wide-ranging too. I agree with and approve of his distaste at Dawkins’ militant atheism, but disagree with his speculation that measures to prevent climate change may now be hopeless. I guess being clever isn’t a gaurantee of being right, nor is a disagreement with memetics a gaurantee of being affected by the memeplex of CAGW ;) Gray’s arguments against memes may stem from his also disbelief in the evolution of free markets, perhaps, (a subject about which I know nothing), but in any case these arguments seem very clunky and old-fashioned, certainly compared to the more subtle and sophicticated objections from competing Darwinian theories within the core domain of Cultural evolution itself. That discipline had been executing decreasing circles around concepts of cultural heritability for decades before Dawkins’ very neat encapsulation with introduction of the meme. Given his wide scope and opposition to (the strong Darwinian end of) cultural evolution, it seems unlikely that Gray would have been unaware of this. Poking fun at new scientific theory as it attempts to condense is a perfectly valid tool of opposition, as long as some reasoning follows up, but per above the latter seems clunky at best (though in truth I haven’t looked at any detail). I should imagine that poking fun is also jolly satisfying if you don’t like the direction the new proposals are going in; while I don’t know the date of the Gray / Revai joke, it seems to me like a really great pre-emptive strike at the the strong Darwinian direction. Sometimes, the jokes go wild when a new theory actually does durst raise its head formally; Wegener, the proposer of plate tectonics, suffered many such, and was thought eccentric at best and mad at worst in his own time, yet 50 years after his first proposal the theory (which made headway in stages) was finally and fully accepted. Not to mention the many jokes about apes and men spawned by Darwin’s first publication, which were thought by those making them to proclaim the self-evidence that evolution couldn’t be a science (some contemporary scientists did indeed agree that it wasn’t). I guess there’s always psychology behind jokes; some are an attempt to ridicule what we don’t feel too comfortable with.

bother! ...a gaurantee of NOT being affected...

Andy: ‘Like evolution maybe ;)’

Ha ha. I was thinking of evolution when I wrote that, in that the evolutionary process in itself doesn’t account for all evolutionary change. For example, geography also plays a part. But I’m sure your essay covers the incorporation of aspects of other disciplines.

In regard to my comment on ‘contrary evidence’, what I meant was a couple of things:

• Some people seem to be resistant to the ‘CAGW ‘virus’. Does memeplex theory have an explanation for this?

• The relationship between the memeplex and knowledge claims in other areas. For example, assume that most who hold the CAGW memeplex also accept, say, evolutionary theory. And assume that at least a proportion CAGW resisters do not accept evolutionary theory. How would memeplex theory deal with these sorts of juxtapositions?

Apologies for the late reply, busy busy...

"But I’m sure your essay covers the incorporation of aspects of other disciplines."

Indeed it does :)

"Some people seem to be resistant to the ‘CAGW ‘virus’. Does memeplex theory have an explanation for this?"

Yes. Though it may be a challenge to fit it understandably in a few paragraphs from what I assume is a cold start 0:

Firstly, one must appreciate that there is a world of difference between a meme and a memeplex, and despite popular understanding the 'viral' model is not wholly applicable to either, but with limits is more applicable to a single meme than to a memeplex. A memeplex is a coherent alliance of co-evolving memes; while one should also be careful in taking biological comparisons too literally, a meme is to a memeplex as a gene is to a gene-pool, for instance as possessed by a species. Think of all the things that a species is that a gene is not, and this will give some idea of the difference. Even when considering a single meme or a small meme group, one must understand that they are very fluid and quite inefficient replicators compared to a modern biological base replicators. As Susan Blackmore puts it: DNA’s cellular copying machinery is now so accurate and reliable that we tend to forget it must have evolved from something simpler. Memes have not had this long history behind them. The new replicator is, as Dawkins (1976 p 192) puts it, “still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup... the soup of human culture.". So, memes are like the very primitive long long long ago ancestors of DNA, and the memeplexes they form are like the many shifting biological partnerships that came and went over a couple of billion years maybe before the more efficient ones started to gain the vastly improved coherency and survival advantages that led to modern higher life-forms. Modern base replicators or hi-jacking replicators (DNA / viruses / prions), are very tight and efficient compared with memes.

Having hopefully set the scene, a good next step is to look at your question first in the light of much more common and long-established memeplexes which everyone is very familiar with, namely religions. In this context the generic answers will hopefully be more intuitive, and then we will be armed to carry them forward to an interpretation within the context of CAGW.

So, until recently pretty much everyone was religious. Hence the primary reason that folks were resistant to a particular religious memeplex, is that they were already immersed in a different one. E.g. Chistians are resistant to the Islamic memeplex. Memeplexes have the means to continuously police orthodoxy and expand their hold into as many adherents as possible, typically attracting supportive infra-structure (money / buildings / resource) and also defending against competing memeplexes; the latter is the origin of religious conflict. This is resistance reason 1.

Now, as well full-blown memeplexes, floating around in the cultural soup are kind of free-radical memes or small meme-groups that haven't made the grade for a memeplex, so aren't associated with all the infra-structure and policing gubbins. Many will be at cultural right-angles to the dominant memeplexes, and hence will not be particularly entangled with them. However, where these memes happen to clash with the agenda of a dominant memeplexes, they can act as catalysts around which resistance to the former might start to coalesce. So for instance memes associated with gnosticism were a constant pain to both Christianity and Islam in medieval times (despite these memes held no more truth than the mainstream religious ones), causing significant defections. This is resistance reason 2.

Memeplexes often form cross-coalitions. Much like the tangled alliances between the European nations, this is an attempted route to increased security and dominance. So, an individual who might normally be sucked into a particular memeplex, may sometimes reject it because an ally of that memeplex is something he is already resisting on a different front. These type of alliances can often cross intellectual domain boundaries, so for instance tying particular religious memeplexes to particular philosophies or politics, or both. For example Protestantism partnering with the new political expressions of the Northern Euopean nations. Another example is the uber-memeplex that formed from the alliance of European Facism with anti-semitism with Eugenics in the 1930s, which saw some of socialist groups abandon Eugenics despite earlier support - they'd become resistant because Eugenics was now a friend of their enemy. This is resistance reason 3.

Taking all of the above together, to some extent we can invoke your viral model as a summary. In biology, pretty much no virus can wipe everyone out. This is 'arranged' by evolution via tremendous genetic polymorphism in populations, a huge and deliberately maintained difference that provides a protection against the diseases we've co-evolved with forever. So even against diseases never met (e.g. smallpox to the American Indians), a few percent will survive unscathed, forming a future resistant population. All the above and more, amounts essentially to *cultural* polymorphism, there is always going to be some folks resistant to any memeplex, even a 'brand new' one, and most are never wholly 'brand new' because they pretty much all incorporate recycled memes from previous incarnations that are just souped up a bit.

Resistance reason 4 is the elimination of uncertainty. Memeplexes survive on uncertainty, the ultimate uncertainty within religions being that no-one can ever prove or disprove the existence of God(s). The memes within memeplexes push psychological hot-buttons that work on fear (e.g. of death) and anxiety and horror and ecstasy and such, plus the good feeling from being noble (this is essentially hi-jacking the mechanisms from altruism). But all these depend on having uncertainty about the core topic. When something is flat fact, even if it may still be a bad fact, you tend not to get runaway emotion about it. Hence there is almost no scope for memetic evolution and the arisal of a memeplex from say, the Newtonian laws of motion or the handbook for your fridge; they are just facts. In the West in recent times, while no-one can disprove the existence of God, the scientific advance into areas the Church once arbitrarily declared as off limits, has had the effect of reducing uncertainty, hence a minority of people are no longer religious or 'spritual'. However, that by no means results in them being free of all memetic influence, for instance nationalism, and secular memeplexes (like CAGW) are on the rise. You might wonder why the logic that reduces uncertainty can't be applied everwhere, eliminating memeplexes. But some things just *are* uncertain, and not only that, once a memeplex gets a hold, via memes that penetrate the pysche it can blind folks to paths that would reduce uncertianty (the probable reason why so little progress has been made on the critical issue of climate sensitivity over the last 30 years). There are very many scientists who are still religious, for instance. We've co-evolved with memes since before homo-sapiens-sapiens, and because they are likely a huge net benefit (another story, but likely civilisation would never have arisen without religions), we are hugely sensitised to them. But some may be essentially parasites living off the mechanism (CAGW is looking like that). Bear in mind also that fridge manuals are very boring; once a memeplex gets started, narrative success is rewarded more than verifiability (factual content), so the truth tends to get swamped out.

So applying all of above to CAGW, some folks would be resistant for say reason 2, believing the meme that says "it's all a hoax". This meme is completely untrue, but resistance can nevertheless coalesce around it. Some folks would be resistant for reason 3; there's a loose alliance between CAGW and the political left (loose because in some countries, like the UK, the whole mainstream political spectrum backs CAGW, but even here there are a few more dissenters on the right), so right-wingers can latch onto the "it's all a liberal conspiracy" meme (also containing very little truth), and build their resistance upon that. Some may be resistant because they've not had a background of immersion in similar envrionmental scare memes, some of which got welded into CAGW, and may also have enough scientific understanding to assess the real uncertainties, rather than the fantasy uncertainties that the memeplex constantly promotes. The former are still wide, but would appear to include only a very small chance indeed of the catastrophic. However, memes are incredily powerful once lodged in the psyche, and alter perceptions, even morals, so many scientists *honestly and passionately* believe in the whole 9 yards of the 'C' in CAGW. Because the relatively new territory of environmental issues has still not been carved up by competing major memeplexes, then I guess reason 1 isn't big; CAGW seems to be the only major player, though there are some older verterans of previous environmental movements (e.g. one of the Greenpeace founders) who combat CAGW based on earlier and now apparantly out-moded green thinking.

There is more, but that's enough for now! See my essay if you want enough detail to swim in. Bear in mind that in speaking of a memeplex as having an ageneda, this doesn't mean it is sentient nor even agential. It's agenda is purely the result of iterative selection over many (meme) generations. This again is similar to viruses; they have many clever tricks up their sleeves, but they neither think or are even (by some definitions) life; their 'skill' is purely the result of algorithms honed over unimaginable time by evolutionary selection.

"The relationship between the memeplex and knowledge claims in other areas. For example, assume that most who hold the CAGW memeplex also accept, say, evolutionary theory. And assume that at least a proportion CAGW resisters do not accept evolutionary theory. How would memeplex theory deal with these sorts of juxtapositions?"

This does not cause any conflict. To stay with your virus model for a while, if out of 100 people 90 have a cold (CAGW) and 10 do not (sceptics), then there is no reason whatsoever why a few of latter shouldn't have scarlet fever (creationsism), while indeed most of the former don't have scarlet fever. But the point is that either group could or couldn't have scarlet fever to whatever degree, it's spread vectors and population vulnerabilities will be an entirely different map to the commem cold. But if it has been around for far longer (creationsism controversy certainly pre-dates CAGW controvesy by a long way), then resistance is likely to be higher (as we see - creationism is not adopted by goevrnments and scientific societies the world over).

As it is with biology, so it is with culture. Memes couch their pushing of pyschological hot buttons within narratives to gain entry, but these narratives have domian boundaries (indeed they are the 'DNA' of the memeplex and must be protected as biology protects the integrity of real DNA). And similarly, the exercise of logic that folks resist memeplexes with per reason 4 above, is also domain based. Perceiving the truth in one domain does not mean perceiving the truth in another. This is partly because if one is immersed in a particulary memeplex, it's memes will in a very real way blind you to the truth, but in a different domain where you may not be 'immersed', there are no such blinds and you may apply less influenced logic.

Hence in the early years of CAGW, it was largely at right-angles to religion, and being religious wasn't likley to say anything about whether you are or aren't a CAGW believer. This is starting to change. CAGW is increasingly muscling into moral territory previously policed by religions. The latter have the choice to form a cross-coalition, or fight CAGW. Both of these are starting to happen in different places, and for instance there are Christian individuals and groups giving (usually muted) sanction to CAGW, but those who are passionately fighting it too (there's a fundamentalist Christian skeptic group referenced in my essay). At the moment this is 2nd rank stuff, amounting to a 'shall-we-shan't-we-dance' exercise, but it could go big-time later.

For the introductory post to 'The CAGW Memeplex' essay, see:
http://wearenarrative.wordpress.com/2013/10/27/the-cagw-memeplex-a-cultural-creature/

Andy, thanks for the detailed post. You have spelled out clearly many aspects of this idea, especially in relation to real-world examples, which is always helpful.

Just a few observations, in no particular order.

1. ‘ ….a meme is to a memeplex as a gene is to a gene-pool …’

A gene-pool can be seen as an emergent phenomenon from within a whole population, whereas in the case of memes it seems that the memeplex can exist both within the individual organism and also across the population. This suggests a qualitative difference between the gene and the meme.

2. The dividing lines between the meme, meme group and memeplex. You mention the notion of ‘AGW hoax’ as a meme, but ‘hoax’ is a complex narrative, comprising the likes of ‘agenda-driven scientist’, ‘power-hungry politician’, ‘opportunist businessman’, ‘gullible public’.

3. Ontology. Genes are material units, whereas memes are ‘cultural’ units. That raises the question of what type of things are memes and their relation to the physical brain.

4. You mention fear of death in the context of uncertainty as a ‘hot-button’ that feeds the memeplex. You say that ‘flat facts’ tend to depress emotion, but death is surely a ‘flat fact’. (And then there’s taxes.)

Presumably, for the individual, not knowing when death may strike could induce uncertainty, and yet there is surely more dread and anxiety in knowing the hour of death than leaving it uncertain.

5. I agree with your emphasis on the agential nature of the memeplex, although some of the language of your essay is strongly agent-flavoured. Presumably, the memeplex is ‘driven’ to survive and colonise because it performs an important function both within the individual psyche and across a population.

That’s enough for the moment. The above is largely for my own benefit, so don’t feel obliged to reply.

Hi Brendan, it is no trouble to provide brief responses to your straightforward points.

1) No. A memeplex cannot possibly exist within an individual; it is entirely analagous to a gene pool in this respect and is identically an emergent phenomenon of the population. A memeplex covers a vast range of allied narrative that no individual could possibly encompass; but even if there were some super-human with hugely enhanced memory in a big head (ok I’m thinking the Teefal men now :) there are other considerations that make this impossible. Firstly, just like for a genetic population, there is per above enormous polymorphism (and for the same reasons). This includes very many mutually exclusive narratives, less so in the core and more so at (opposite) peripheral edges, again similar to biology. But unless our Teefal man had also many many thousands of well-isolated schizonphrenic characters, he cannot possibly hold these mutual exclusions (in fact a small number are possible even in normal individuals, but this would be orders of magnitude outside that capacity). This mutual exclusion as a feature of polymorphism is analagous to mutually incompatible allele patterns of gene loci in DNA, the simplest being that some folks have an ‘on’ in a particular position, and some folks have on ‘off’. There are very many such. The second problem is that, again just like in biology, the population is a dynamically shifting topology in time. This is slower in biology (yet for fast-generation organisms that might have many millions of individuals born/die every minute – e.g. some insects – still not that slow), and faster in culture, so our hugely schizonphrenic Teefal man would now have to have perfect real-time comms connections to everyone else in the total population to constantly update his enormous copy of the actual memeplex. Can’t work! (even with the biggest phone bill in the universe). Just like for a gene-pool, every expression at the individual level will be different, despite they are all recognisably within the same population. In the Catholic memeplex there are about 1.2 billion individuals. At the very very very very etc detailed level, everyone’s Catholic narrative slice will be slightly different, and because of the vast and constantly evolving topography, many aspects of many such views will be mutually incompatible. This is all the same as biology.

2) The best way to think of memes is not in terms of their precise text, but the shortcuts they make to the (culturally pre-sensitised) emotional parts of the brain. This is what they get selected upon. So for instance, the general and swift reaction to the word ‘hoax’, or at least its equivalent in earlier or alternate languages, would occur both now and at historic eras, e.g. in medieval Europe when there weren’t even any scientists let alone agenda-driven ones, nor any professional politicans power-hungry or otherwise, and neither businessmen in the sense that we know, although traders certainly. But the concept ‘hoax’ still translates to an immediately understandable and immediate gut reaction that would occur within the context of the time (e.g. power hungry barons, agenda driven priests, rougue traders, etc). If one has the strength to stop and think, all words *could* be parsed and understood and tested against reality, logically, but the whole point about memes is that they are a substitute for thought. Even in theory, no-one can actually stop and think in first principles about all communication that impinges upon them, nor could societies ever have worked if folks tried to do this. So no-one calls up all the subroutines and examines each of their concepts and tests those with reality, for *the majority* of their communication. Hence when skeptics say “it’s a hoax” or alarmists say “evil big oil”, many target folks at whom these phrases are aimed simply go with their gut feel, which itself is what the meme evokes, and then the level and spread of ‘belief’ moves the perceptions of the whole population accordingly.

3) What type of thing are memes is I guess at the leading edge, and there is much literature on this. Most everyone in cultural evolution seems to figure that there’s some kind of inheritable cultural unit, yet hardly anyone seems particularly close to pinning it down. As the answer to 2 hints, and as you rightly assume, what happens deep in the brain is the key to what this unit is, not things like the precise text / language / phrasing etc. Memes might better be defined by which psychological buttons they hit. This is all at the intersect of Athropology, Cultural Evolution, Pyschology, Neuro-Science and other disciplines no doubt. (In Neuro-Science I go with Michael Gazzaniger's concept of the 'Social Mind', which sits very well with memetic influence). There was approximately a century between the publishing of Darwin's theory of natural selection, and the formal discovery of DNA, which provided the required mechanism underneath. The fact that throughout most of this century no-one had much of a clue as to how packetised inheritance worked (though there were many theories), and there was no such identified unit as a 'gene', didn't stop there being enormous progress in explaining biological systems via the application of Darwin's theory. Indeed I've read (but not verified by checking Darwin's writings myself), that the mechanism Darwin himself proposed (pangenesis?) turned out to be very far from reality. [The word 'gene', from 'pangen', from pangenesis, started to be used about halfway through that century, even though no-one knew biologically what it consisted of at the time]. All strongly Darwinian theories of cultural evolution, of which one is memetics, find themselves in this same position of identifiying macro path but not micro mechanism. While I hope it will be much less than a century before we know the mechanisms, this does not stop us applying memetic theory where it seems to produce great results; for instance as it seems to do in explaining religions or secular memeplexes like CAGW.

4) Well some atheist plus realist folks may consider death a flat fact, I guess maybe you are one. But within the modern world population these still in a tiny minority, and throughout most of history essentially zero. The *cultural* reality is that the fear of non-being has had more cultural / emotional play around it than anything else, and narrative sets to do this are some of the biggest components of most religions. Even now, even in the developed and supposedly scientific West, more folks believe in religion or spiritualism than not, and one of the biggest persuaders is the promise that death isn’t the end, or to put it another way, “trust us: death isn’t really death, just sign here”. Fear of non-being dissapears if you think you will always be. This is precisely the point of memetic transmission, ‘flat facts’ are drowned by the much better spreadability of ‘perceived knowledge’ that pushes one of the pyschological buttons. To transform death back to a true flat fact in the perceptions of religious and spiritual believers (the vast majority of folks on the planet), you would have to reduce the uncertainties (essentially to zero) about an afterlife / heaven / re-incarnation / whatever by *actually demonstrating* that there cannot be, beyond any shadow of a doubt, any of these. Good luck to you!

5) Yes, memeplexes have very important *net* advantage for populations. It is likely that without religion, there would have been no arisal of civilisation. That doesn’t mean all aspects are good, hence ‘net’ above, and some individual memeplexes can I guess be net negative, as CAGW seems to be right now. The language is agential simply because (just as likewise talking about biological entities on the edge of life: prions, DNA, ‘the selfish gene’ :) English has no non-agential way of explaining the concepts without being very very cumbersome indeed. See my answer to wrecktafire on my guest post at WUWT regarding language and language caveats, which fully explains this situation.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/02/the-catastrophic-agw-memeplex-a-cultural-creature/#comment-1472629