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on 2/15/02 7:19 PM, memetics-digest at fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk wrote:
> Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 19:37:12 -0500
> From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu>
> Subject: Re:
>
> Hi Steve Drew -
>
>> More to the point, culture does appear to be replicated
>
> Permit my skepticism to show on that point as well.
>
> Spiders can replicate their webs. Termites their mounds. The thought that
> most of what we call culture is just as instinctual is not preposterous.
>
> Culture could be just such a phenonemon. Changing to meet the local
> variances, but, regardless of our complex sort of webs, innately
> processed and actualized.
>
> Language, innately prepared for, is nevertheless localized to
> environmental conditions. What is local is being expanded, of course, in
> this global world of the new millennium. (Is it english that is winning?
> Last I knew, it was.) But, is anything 'changing'?
>
> Perhaps not.
>
> And, what is being replicated? Artifacts? Are they not simply the local
> conditions? Could they not be considered reactions, and not replications?
>
> Sure they could. In the same way birds react by altering songs, and
> spiders react by altering webs, and termites react by altering mounds.
> Innately. Sociobiologically.
>
> However, I like the idea of memes being the units of the cultural
> environment, and I have just adopted the behavior-only stance in an
> attempt to leave all the other reactive processes where they started,
> deep in innate development and stimulus/reaction. And also to put some
> borders around the term, and make it studiable.
>
> But, even there, we don't need it.
>
> The real case for its presence is absent. It is the unicorn in the
> garden. A science-fiction writer's conceit.
>
> Or, it's really there.
>
> At the moment, I, like Pyrrho, hold it to be and not to be.
>
> - - Wade
As you may be aware i am not too keen on behaviour only, as i feel it
reduces us to automata. Nothing wrong with a dose of skepticism though.
Steve
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