Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id TAA10366 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Sat, 4 Mar 2000 19:11:57 GMT To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Sat, 04 Mar 2000 11:09:24 -0800 From: "Scott Chase" <hemidactylus@my-Deja.com> Message-ID: <BMJFFPIDIKAOCCAA@my-deja.com> X-Sent-Mail: off X-Mailer: MailCity Service Subject: Re: J.Z. Young on mnemons X-Sender-Ip: 209.240.200.114 Organization: My Deja Email (http://www.my-deja.com:80) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Language: en Content-Length: 3499 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
--On Sat, 04 Mar 2000 12:03:58 Aaron Lynch wrote: >At 08:40 AM 3/4/00 -0800, Scott Chase wrote: >>This is an apt quote from J.Z. Young: >> >>(bq) "Incidentally many modern ideas on the subject go back to Richard >Semon (1904) who wrote much of the mneme or mnemic faculty and invented the >word engram. I do not think however that anyone has used mnemon or a >similar word in quite the same sense of the module now to be proposed" (eq) >> >>ref: >> >>Young JZ. 1965. The organization of a memory system. Proceedings of the >Royal Society of London (163): 285*-320 >> >>I may have goofed the initial page number on my previous post. >> >>Scott >> > > >Thank you, Scott. > >I have actually seen this article, although not until after inventing a new >definition for "mnemon" and publishing it in 1991. I do not, however, the >term in the same sense as the module Young (1965) proposes. Young's meaning >also differs from my own in that he does not define "mnemon" as something >that can be "the same" from one organism to another. Young's "mnemon" is >thus not, in my view, a memetics-related term: without "sameness" from >individual to individual, there can be no "replication," and Young does not >discuss "replication." Also, Young's usage seems does not seem to be in >current usage by memory researchers as far as I can tell. I would, however, >be interested in hearing from anyone who finds a memory research paper or >other science paper from the past 25 years that uses the word. I intend to >make a more comprehensive footnote about the word in future works. Notice >that Young also expresses some uncertainty about whether anyone else has >used "mnemon" before he did. That is not surprising, since the word itself >is easily coined. Nevertheless, I would also appreciate hearing from anyone >who knows of a usage pre-dating Young's. > >I also have found one dictionary that lists "Mnemon" with a Greek mythology >definition, although this may be a typographical mutation of "Memnon." > > I haven't delved into the entirety of Young's corpus, so I'm unsure of whether Young is the originator of the term mnemon. He did use the term though. I've focused more on Semon and even in his case only on one of his books. Mnemon (ala your usage and Young's usage) might be preferable to engram (ala Semon's and Lashley's usage) for a memory unit, because the latter has such a negative connotation. Interestingly Leo Buss introduces the term engram though in his book _The Evolution of Individuality_.
Some of Semon's other ideas, such as the term ecphory for memory retrieval and engraphy for memory encoding might apply to memetics. As far as analogies between genes and memes, Semon's work might also be applicable (or at least of interest). My views are very tentative and not thoroughly fleshed out yet. Diffidence is the word I'm probably looking for here (my confidence level is close to baseline). In a historical perspective Semon is fascinating because of his association with Ernst Haeckel and German evolutionary biology of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century.
I'm not overly familiar with the Greek mythology, but isn't there something about Mnemosyne and the Muses?
The cool part about J.Z. Young was that one of his books was a supplemental text for a vertebrate zoology course I took a few years ago.
Scott
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