On Saturday, May 17, 2003, at 12:31 PM, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
At 09:47 AM 5/17/03 -0700, Tim May wrote: You mention Darwin but not Richard Dawkins author of _Selfish Gene_ and later meme theories. Memes are basically ideas. They can replicate, compete, cooperate, etc. Brains are the medium in which they grow.
Memes like "believe me or believers kill you" are particularly cancerous.
If you haven't read Dawkins, you should, and he's quite an enjoyable read.
I first met Dawkins at the Artificial Life Conference in 1987 in Los Alamos. I had of course already read "The Selfish Gene" and, as I recall, "The Extended Phenotype" (at or around that time). (That was just about the best conference I ever attended. Only about 100-125 of us, and a lot of interesting people. I hear the followup conferences, which I never attended, were much larger and with fewer of the interesting luminaries.) As for who I mentioned, I didn't mention a _lot_ of related names. I'm not as convinced as some that Dawkins has rewritten our understanding of things. The ideas of replication of things, companies, sets of ideas, empires, etc. has been around for a long time. "The Nature of the Firm" said much the same thing several decades ago. A friend of mine, Keith Henson, takes "memetics" much more seriously, though. --Tim May "You don't expect governments to obey the law because of some higher moral development. You expect them to obey the law because they know that if they don't, those who aren't shot will be hanged." - -Michael Shirley