From: Wade T. Smith (wade.t.smith@verizon.net)
Date: Thu 05 Jun 2003 - 12:00:45 GMT
On Thursday, June 5, 2003, at 06:53 AM, Joe wrote:
> All these things are cognitively held templates, and as such, are
> internal, not external.
This is where you are mostly wrong- these things are decidedly 
external, and maintained externally. They are environmental to cultural 
evolution. There is no memory of any of these things without the 
external connections.
Here is your excellent list again-
"widely distributed laws, rules, maxims, slogans, parables, fables, 
analogues, metaphors, similes, hermeneutics, paradigms, theories, 
formulas, parameters, schematics, blueprints, designs, definitions, 
heuristics, and other more or less formal holistic 
representations/characterizations or analytic rules of thumb"
- and without the necessary recording languages and mechanisms, above 
listed, of culture, any one of them would become meaningless, and we 
know this to be true.
What is internal in the performance model of cultural evolution is the 
working of the human brain. Not the memetic facts of a culture, but a 
facet of two (at least) of the players in its game. The facts 
themselves can only come in performance, and it is these facts that 
this, particular, model, calls memes.
- Wade
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