Meaning as Use: Transmission Fidelity and Evolution in NetNews

Gatherer & McEwan (1998) respond to our article (Pocklington & Best, 1997) with several apparently serious criticisms, concluding that our foray into cultural transmission theory is fundamentally flawed. Here we deal with each of their criticisms, in most cases by restating more precisely our model and claims. First we will outline some of the errors in their interpretation of our model and results. The bulk of their criticisms arise, we suspect, from the low fidelity transmission of ideas from our original paper. This has caused a misunderstanding of our description of units of selection. Second, we deal with some of their particular methodological criticisms. While some of their ideas might promote a more general approach to cultural evolution, none of them impinge on the validity of the particular results we report. A third source of disagreement is their differing conception of evolution and their anti-reductionist stance. While we leave for others a debate as to when an holistic approach offers a satisfactory addition to scientific reductionism, we here present our argument for the utility of rigorous replicatorbased reductionism. Finally, we claim that unless they are willing to place their alternative framework in a concrete form and empirically demonstrate the coherency of their putative units of selection, their arguments for a coarser grained level of analysis are tenuous.