Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id MAA13755 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Fri, 19 May 2000 12:50:01 +0100 Message-ID: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D31CEB1BA@inchna.stir.ac.uk> From: Vincent Campbell <v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk> To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Subject: RE: Central questions of memetics Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 12:47:52 +0100 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
I see your argument here, and as a social scientist it may indeed by a
professional reservation I have over going the whole hog regarding natural
selection's influence on human behaviour, because it might put me out of a
job! :-)
But, as I've said before, I think there's a different question one can ask
about culture- or actually, technology which you refer to a lot. And that
is what is the process by which such things spread?
Let's forget culture for a moment, and talk about technology. You have said
on this list explicitly that technological change drives cultural change.
Let's accept that for a moment. Let's accept also that technology spreads
because it has utility, I certainly have no problem with this. My question
is thus how does technology spread? It quite clearly does not spread
genetically. The process of technological evolution may be analogous to
natural selection but it is not the same as it because it is not conducted
through genes.
Now if processes like technological or cultural evolution are not conducted
via natural selection, then surely it is appropriate to ask if such systems
are governed by different "rules" to natural selection. They may not in a
general sense, but in two ways this is an important question. First, because
even if you use the same terminology for technological or cultural
evolution, such as utility, the meaning of utility in these different
systems may be different from what it means in terms of the genes. Second,
although there is much debate about it, technological change may have
already had significant impacts on selection pressures within humans, such
as the possible relationship between the discovery of cooking, and the
decrease in the size of our ancestors' teeth.
As a media scholar it is the process rather than the underlying origins or
determining basis of that process that interests me. I'm not interested
necessarily in why people believe religion 'a', but the process by which
religion 'a' spread. It may spread because it's useful to its believers,
but so what? What's interesting to me is how religion 'a' spreads, and we
know that particular religions aren't spread genetically (although the
capacity to have beliefs, religious or otherwise, is presumably genetic), so
how are they spread, and what are the characteristics of the ways they are
spread?
And it is what I think memetics is offering.
Vincent
> ----------
> From: Chuck Palson
> Reply To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2000 10:10 am
> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Subject: Re: Central questions of memetics
>
>
>
> Vincent Campbell wrote:
>
> > Thanks for this Robin,
> >
> > Good to hear from someone so close by!
> >
> > I think you're right about the 'usefulness' thing. It reminds me of a
> body
> > of media effects research, known as the 'uses and gratifications'
> approach,
> > which looked at media effects from the point of view of the reasons
> people
> > have for useing the media.
>
> I agree with you that this is very poor research. It is simply
> tautological: if
> they say it gratifies, than the function is gratification! There is no
> attempt
> to get at what gratification means in terms of its underlying dynamic --
> and, as
> a result, there is no way to falsify the hypothesis. As I have pointed out
> in
> other posts, people who don't like evolutionary theory say that it is
> tautological, not realizing that it IS falsifiable. Their frustration is
> this:
> evolution seems to explain everything so it must be tautological. But
> there ARE
> ways to falsify evolutionary hypotheses; Darwin said that if a horse
> evolves
> with a saddle, evolution would be proven wrong.
>
> My use value notion of memes is the same way. It IS falsifiable. Part of
> the
> problem is that it gets mixed up with the drivel that has come out of
> social
> science for years which generates such nonsense as "people do x because
> they
> like it" or "people adopt change x because they like change x." Another
> part of
> the problem is that once the general principles are understood, it may be
> obvious - which takes the fun out of it because social scientists get a
> lot of
> emotional mileage out of novealty. But most of the time it isn't obvious
> because
> people want to hide the use value of their behavior under the camoflage of
> moral
> maxims. But in any event, discovering use value is not tautological
> because it
> is every bit as falsifiable as Darwin's theory; that's no accident because
> it is
> an integral part of Darwin's theory!
>
>
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
> Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
> For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
> see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
>
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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