Is Self-Replication Required for the Growth of Knowledge?
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.My neo-Darwinian approach to the mind suggests that minds evolve knowledge through the imperfect replication of ideas.
Some people (most notably Ella Hoeppner) have argued that replication isn’t necessary for evolution to take place. All you need is variation and selection.
My response has always been that I don’t care whether replication is a necessary component of evolution, but that, 1), in the Popperian spirit, we shouldn’t break with other evolutionary theories unnecessarily. Genes and memes both replicate.
2) We can explain more if we use replicators. For example, memory and the origin of creativity just ‘fall out’ of the neo-Darwinian approach. Ideas in a single mind may have static vs dynamic replication strategies. All of that is lost without the notion of replication.
3) From what I’ve seen, the attempt to remove replication from evolution doesn’t actually remove it.
If you take some string of information and vary it, then by definition, only parts of it become different. Other parts are preserved. Even if you vary the string several times, the parts that didn’t change were still instantiated at each stage. So they still replicated. (As I recall, this is how Richard Dawkins defines what a gene is, in his book The Selfish Gene.)
Also, just by thinking about the string of information and how to vary it, you’ve already replicated the information. It now exists in its original medium and in your mind.