RE: Watches & Necklaces

From: Scott Chase (ecphoric@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed 28 May 2003 - 21:42:00 GMT

  • Next message: Lawrence DeBivort: "RE: back to basics"

    >From: "Richard Brodie" <richard@brodietech.com>
    >Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    >To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
    >Subject: RE: Watches & Necklaces
    >Date: Wed, 28 May 2003 13:36:35 -0700
    >
    >Scott wrote:
    >
    ><<Simply put the parasitic relationship is +-, the commensal relationship
    >is
    >+0 and the mutual relationship is ++. The + means fitness or benefit
    >inceases where - means these decrease. 0 means no effect. Minkoff's text
    >(p.
    >157) discusses population increases versus decreases and the Lotka-Volterra
    >equations.
    >
    >I don't know how easily these relationships can be parsed in nature.>>
    >
    >It would seem easy to extend this, then, to gene-meme symbioses. Education,
    >for example, is parasitic because it reduces genetic fitness. How about
    >them
    >apples?
    >
    >
    And what the heck do you mean by education here? Whatever it means to you are you gonna use a simple either/or (educated/uneducated) dichotomy or would there be levels of education achieved, such as by grade level, high school or its equivalency, college and advanced degree?

    How are you defining and quantifying genetic fitness for this particular analysis?

    Are you implying that education tends to correlate with reduction in the number of offspring? What about the quality of investment in those offspring? Some of lesser education might have more offspring, but how well are these offsring provided for versus the relatively educated person with a better job and more money to provide for needs of fewer offspring?

    The r-strategy is cheap, spewing gametes out in the hopes that some will take root and survive. The K-strategy is more expensive, investing in the future of fewer offspring, including college education giving them a better foothold.

    You might think of education as a parasite because it reduces gametic output, but this is looking at things through the lense of biological evolution and fitness as measured by reproductive output, without consideration of quality of life for offspring being improved by education and ensuring their relative chances of success and that of their offspring down the generations. If person A is uneducated and has 10 uneducated kids, how do the chances for survival and reproduction of these kids compare to person B who is educated and has 2 educated kids? Would all 10 children of person A survive and subsequently produce children of their own in the same societal superstructure as that of person B with their offspring when looking at their respective lineages down the generations?

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