Visited the website for the Journal of Memetics to see if they had any new stuff, and this article jumped out at me:
"Cultural Transmission and the Capacity to Approve or Disapprove of Offspring?s Behaviour"
Abstract:
"We suggest that human cultural learning was made possible by the simultaneous appearance, in one of our hominid ancestors, of two capacities: the capacity to imitate others? behaviour and the capacity to approve or disapprove of others? behaviour. With the help of a mathematical model, we have studied the conditions that allow the evolution of both capacities. We consider four different genotypes: "the only-learner" that learns by trial and error, "the imitator" that learns by trial and error and imitation, "the only-assessor" that learns by trial and error but that can also approve or disapprove of offspring's behaviour and, finally, "the assessor", who behaves like the imitator but, he can approve or disapprove of offspring's behaviour. The assessor genotype is the best genotype and the only-learner genotype is the worst when the learned behaviour that would be culturally transmitted is adaptive.... "
Evidently, there's nothing that applies to long-ago debates with my parents over my not going to medical school...