Susan Blackmore

The application of natural selection to culture has been called 'memetics'. This is the theory that, like living things, ideas - or 'memes' - naturally vary and that (generally) the 'fittest' ideas survive and are replicated across generations.

Richard Dawkins first introduced the word in The Selfish Gene (1976) to discuss evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. He gave as examples melodies, catch-phrases, and beliefs (notably religious beliefs), clothing/fashion, and the technology of building arches.

But like a good deal of Dawkins' thinking, 'memes' is not actually science, but philosophy. Dawkins likes to promote evolution as the total answer to everything, and in the process has come up with this piece of philosophical nonsense that, while it might explain something we already know (ideas catch on), isn't actually science in any sense.

Regrettably, he has a number of disciples who plainly believe that 'memes' actually mean something. Susan Blackmore appears to be a prime example.

In the 31st July edition of New Scientist, (that most evolutionary-minded of all magazines) she has written an extraordinary piece in which she proclaims the following 'scientific' thinking:

What do I mean by "third replicator"? The first replicator was the gene - the basis of biological evolution. The second was memes - the basis of cultural evolution. I believe that what we are now seeing, in a vast technological explosion, is the birth of a third evolutionary process. We are Earth's Pandoran species, yet we are blissfully oblivious to what we have let out of the box.

Along with Dawkins, she thinks that genes have a mind of their own, and that memes (which didn't exist until Dawkins dreamt them up) have a similar ability to hop from human to human and do their own thing.

What does the following actually mean? This might sound apocalyptic, but it is how the world looks when we realise that Darwin's principle of evolution by natural selection need not apply just to biology. Given some kind of copying machinery that makes lots of slightly different copies of the same information, and given that only a few of those copies survive to be copied again, an evolutionary process must occur and design will appear out of destruction. You might call it "design by death" since clever designs thrive because of the many failures that don't.

She then goes waffling on about humans being 'lumbering robots' (Dawkins said so, so it must be right) that genes have built to carry them around, propagate them and protect them. Her article is a fanciful piece of stuff that is basically being made up as it goes along. It's pure speculation given some respectability by being published in a well-known magazine, one that often does have some real science in it.

The third replicator, of course, is technology, specifically the Internet, where apparently, according to Bradshaw, "We should also expect design to appear spontaneously, and it does. Much of the content on the web is now designed automatically by machines rather than people."

Oh, dear.

Short Circuit 2

Finally turned up Short Circuit 2 on DVD, and surprisingly, it stands up better than the first in the series. Fisher Stevens gets to play the main role, which is a good thing, and with the support of Michael McKean (an actor who doesn't apparently age - he looks as young/old here as he does in those later mockumentaries he's well known for).
But the star of the show is still Johnny 5. Here he steals every scene he's in with ease, and gets away with incredible feats and stunts. So what, he's a star. Once again he's voiced by Tim Blaney, who seems to have spent most of his screen career being heard and not seen. Blaney has the character down pat, in every detail. Without this particular voice, there's no doubt Johnny would be an altogether different robot.
The plot is no big deal; the movie's about Johnny 5 rather than anything more complicated. And it's a lot of fun. Catching up with both Johnny and and Fisher Stevens's malapropisms again makes it well worth watching more than once.

Short Circuit

I haven’t seen Short Circuit since my children were young – it was one of those movies (along with its sequel) that we watched over and over. The story and characters are pretty simple, but what makes the film is the wonderful character of Johnny 5 with his increasingly warm ‘humanity,’ his delightful eyebrows, and his constant cry of Need More Input!
I thought Steve Guttenberg was good at the time, but he seems a bit flat in the movie now, a bit slow-paced. And I thought Ally Sheedy must have vanished from the movie scene, but in fact she's kept on making movie after movie ever since (and made a number before this as well). She plays an over-the-top-irritating, too silly for her own good, and pretty much one-note character whom we don’t ever really believe in. Fisher Stevens’ pseudo Indian character (the father of all the other Asian IT people in movies?) has some funny malapropic lines and some surprisingly crude ones, considering this is supposed to be a kids’ movie. He was the only actor to make it into the sequel, where I think his lines might have been toned down a little, but it’s a long time since I saw the sequel (which also featured Michael McKean, that mad actor who’s appeared in some of the spoof documentaries made by Christopher Guest).
All the actors seem to be on that second-level area where they get plenty of work but they’re not really household names. I thought Steve Guttenberg had vanished from movies, as well, but in fact, he’s been just as busy as Sheedy. Obviously there are thousands of movies out there that we just never hear of – until you check out IMDB!
Any carping about the movie aside, it’s Johnny 5 who’s the real star. Apparently there were more than a dozen actual Johnny 5s, swapped and shuffled as required. Certainly some of them must have barely survived the ‘stunts’ they went through.

Transformers

I had the movie, Transformers, thrust in front of me last night when my younger son got it out of the video shop. My initial reaction was: shall I go and do something else? In fact, Transformers turned out to be a sharp and funny movie, with some off-the-wall characters, and an ability to make an action movie interesting as well as spectacular.
I must admit I lost track of which Transformer was which much of the time, and to have the nastiest of them all, Megatron, frozen for most of the movie was a bit of a mistake I think, but I enjoyed the vocal characterizations (the transformers learned to speak off the World Wide Web) and the visuals were splendid.
But it was more of a surprise to have a bunch of actors in amongst all the technology who were interesting people. Shia LeBeouf (whom I’d forgotten until I checked I’d seen in Holes several years ago) was full of energy, wit, and verve; Megan Fox transformed a role that could have been nothing but a sex figure into something human; Rachael Taylor’s wonderful Tasmanian accent grated against all the US ones, and Kevin Dunn and Julie White as LeBeouf’s parents were superbly cast. John Turturro makes the most of a wonderfully obsessive Sector 7 agent.
And the minor characters are often unexpectedly interesting, such as the Indian telephone operator who’s more interested in the right way to make the phone call than in contacting the Pentagon for an emergency; or the crazy Black computer geek and his family.
There are times when the action’s over the top, but in the middle of it all there’s this wonderful humour, which gives the film life. It’s as if the writers decided that straight action wasn’t get this movie into the A-stream, and they were probably right. So they put some scenes in that will give the adults something interesting, and this balances the whole thing out admirably.
I should have gone to see it on the big screen – huge things cease to be huge on the small – but not having done so, I’ll have to watch it again and try and work what’s actually happening in some of the grunty fight scenes.
By the way, I watched it with comments from my son and son-in-law about who all the Transformers were, what their histories were, whether they'd actually ever had any of them as children and so on. I was rather astonished at the detailed remembering of this curious craze.