RE: Mini case study of memetic mutation

From: Vincent Campbell (VCampbell@dmu.ac.uk)
Date: Thu 14 Nov 2002 - 15:06:54 GMT

  • Next message: Grant Callaghan: "Re: Aunger speaks"

            <I do think that the virus metaphor is valid in at least two ways. First,
    > epidemiological thinking does help us understand the spread of memes.
    > Second, probably most of culture is caught rather than taught.>
    >
            Can't help myself... got to say in our consumer culture, "culture" is mostly bought.

            Actually, more seriously I think the virus metaphor doesn't encapsulate the spread of memes for me. After all teaching is part of cultural transmission as well, and that surely changes the environmental conditions in which any virus-like memes operate so much so that the metaphor may lose its strength.

            Vincent

    =============================================================== 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 archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu 14 Nov 2002 - 15:22:03 GMT