In the 70s, two scientific approaches to the evolutionary study of culture emerged – memetics and the gene-culture coevolutionary theory. While the gene-culture coevolutionary theory still thrives, memetics appears to be a dead scientific discipline. Why?
Radim’s paper, which focuses on diachronic development of memetics rather than its logical inconsistencies, claims that while the field of gene-culture coevolution focused on testing hypotheses, memetics got preoccupied with the ontology of the meme as a discrete unit of selection, strictly applying the gene-centered approach to culture, and differentiating between biological and memetic fitness. Thus, memetics was unable to study the adaptive function of culture, an approach that proved fruitful in the gene-culture coevolutionary theory.
You can find the article here: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/posc_a_00350
Martin Lang received the Czech National Foundation’s Junior Star grant with his project titled Computing Religious Devotion: How Reinforcing Supernatural Beliefs Affects Normative Models in the Mind.
The vice-rector for Research and Doctoral Studies at Masaryk University has awarded two LEVYNA graduates - Dan Řezníček and Radim Chvaja with a price for excellent results during their Ph.D. studies.
