Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id LAA07132 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 31 May 2000 11:50:32 +0100 Message-ID: <20000531104808.16033.qmail@hotmail.com> X-Originating-IP: [212.1.141.31] From: "Diana Stevenson" <dianaxf@hotmail.com> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: Cui bono, Chuck Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 03:48:08 PDT Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Chuck wrote:
>As for the biological fitness of those people who don't have faxes and have
>more children, that is a short run situation that is already disappearing.
>The
>vast bulk of these very same people are at this moment being forced off the
>land by mechanized agriculture where they go to live in the cities --
>where
>they have birth rates that are rapidly falling because urban birth rates
>**always** fall to below replacement rates.
I understand this, but Blackmore's point was about how many fax machines and
computers she has in her home - and elsewhere she makes a point about
two-profession couples deciding to have children late or not at all. This
is very noticeable in my own community. I live in a village which has
become a commuter suburb of Oxford. There are many academics and
professionals here with houses full of fax machines and computers - but no
children, or just one or two which they've had late in life with the help of
IVF or other technologies.
The rest of the community is descended from agricultural workers; they have
no fax machines and rarely a computer in the house but they provide almost
all the children for the local primary and secondary schools. They marry
young, buy a house near their parents and start producing children at 19 or
20. A combination of factory shift work, welfare benefits and free
healthcare makes this possible. Of course their employers have fax machines
and computers but they personally have no use for them. They are mostly
kind, friendly people but very lacking in memes: they have nothing to talk
about except the children or football. Other than that, they do just fine -
and have lots of healthy children.
I imagine Blackmore lives in a similar community and *has* made this
connection (erroneously or not!). This may be a "short run situation that
is already disappearing" but the entrenched nature of the class system in
England means the change will take some time. If anything, differences
between meme-producers and gene-producers appear to be widening.
Most
>historians, however, cannot be compared to the others you mention because
>they
>are committed to the narrative form of explanation and are extremely
>resistant
>to using scientific concepts to explain history.
My first degree was in economic and social history and we did study
econometric and statistical analysis to some extent. I think historians
(and anthropologists) could make a great contribution to memetics if we get
them interested. Why not add a new tool? They wouldn't have to abandon the
others.
>As for the rest of the social sciences, large portions of them are in sorry
>shape because of the politicization of their fields.
Presumably they would claim that both sociobiology and memetics are
deficient because they lack political and economic analysis - which they do.
Memetics could add some tools too.
The main reason they don't
>get anywhere much these days is their insistence that the hard sciences are
>largely ideology and no more objective than the social sciences. It is a
>barely
>disguised attempt to divert some of the funding going into the sciences
>into
>their own coffers, and it has an enormously distorting effect on their
>research. In fact, their resistance to using scientific method and theory
>in
>their research has been the principle cause for why they have made no
>progress
>in discovering the principles of human behavior over the last two
>generations.
>
>Some of them, however, are beginning to use sociobiology as the umbrella
>field
>for all the social sciences and are having impressive results. That is the
>direction most of them will eventually go, although it will take some
>time.
>
>
This is very interesting, Chuck - I would like to know more. Are
sociobiologists interested in economics, and can they suggest ways to avoid
the coming environmental catastrophe? That really *would* be useful.
Diana
------
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