Imagine if you stop believing that beliefs are in the head and locate themselves in a community or institution. If interested, you could start with How Institutions Think by Mary Douglas.
This sounds to me a lot like “Imagine if you stop believing that information is in the genes and locate it in a species.”
I don’t think institutional effects on thought are a bad thing to study- institutions definitely have massive effects on the environments individuals operate in- but I think assigning thinking entity status to institutions is a bad way to approach that study. Thinking about information stored in species has a long and storied history of making worse predictions than thinking about information stored in genes.
But institutions certainly apply selection pressure on memes, and influence how memes replicate themselves and propagate. The analogy is also somewhat tenuous- institutions are far more fluid (almost by definition) in their boundaries than species. Because of their tremendous impact, institutional design deserves comparable attention to environmental design (architecture, agriculture, lots of smaller fields).
(We do already have those fields, though; the economy is the environment commercial institutions are built for (and other institutions reside in as well), and economists try to study it and design it. Public choice theorists help study the design of (primarily democratic) political institutions.)
This sounds to me a lot like “Imagine if you stop believing that information is in the genes and locate it in a species.”
I don’t think institutional effects on thought are a bad thing to study- institutions definitely have massive effects on the environments individuals operate in- but I think assigning thinking entity status to institutions is a bad way to approach that study. Thinking about information stored in species has a long and storied history of making worse predictions than thinking about information stored in genes.
But institutions certainly apply selection pressure on memes, and influence how memes replicate themselves and propagate. The analogy is also somewhat tenuous- institutions are far more fluid (almost by definition) in their boundaries than species. Because of their tremendous impact, institutional design deserves comparable attention to environmental design (architecture, agriculture, lots of smaller fields).
(We do already have those fields, though; the economy is the environment commercial institutions are built for (and other institutions reside in as well), and economists try to study it and design it. Public choice theorists help study the design of (primarily democratic) political institutions.)