From: Vincent Campbell (VCampbell@dmu.ac.uk)
Date: Tue 08 Jul 2003 - 09:27:09 GMT
Very interesting, although it strikes me that there's a difference between
skills that can be conveyed as easily non-verbally as verbally (or indeed
even better non-verbally). Whilst making a flint axe can be learnt through
demonstration, copying and practice, it seems that things like the laws,
religion, history etc of a social group cannot be easily transmitted without
language. I wouldn't dispute the notion of stone tools as memes (as regular
list members will know from my position on memes, effectively, as
artefacts), or their social significance, but do we define a culture by its
artefacts or tools, or by the communicative meaning that those artefacts
convey to members of that culture?
I guess it's a bit of both. We talk historically of ages of stone, bronze,
iron, agriculture, industry etc. which are rooted in the technology of the
time, but once historical records appear we add in all sorts of cultural
tropes, like myths, religions, rituals, etc. etc.
Vincent
> ----------
> From: Keith Henson
> Reply To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Sent: Sunday, July 6, 2003 2:27 PM
> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Subject: Silent memes
>
> I have recently been skimming through Scientific Americans I missed
> reading
> in the past few years. The Dec. 2001 issue had an article "How we came to
>
> be Humans" by Ian Tattersall. I found something related to recent
> discussion on this list. Here is a paragraph:
>
> "This inevitably brings up the question about the Neanderthals that
> everyone wants answered: Could they talk? Many people, especially looking
> at the spectacularly beautiful stone tools that the Neanderthals made with
>
> such skill, find it hard to believe that they couldn't. How, other than
> through the use of language, could such remarkable skills have been passed
>
> down over the generations? Well, not long ago a group of Japanese
> researchers made a preliminary stab at addressing this problem. They
> divided a group of undergraduates in two and taught one half how to make a
>
> typical Neanderthal stone tool by using elaborate verbal explanations
> along
> with practical demonstrations. The other half they taught by silent
> example
> alone. One thing this experiment dramatically revealed was just how tough
> it is to make stone tools; some of the undergraduates never became
> proficient. But more remarkable still was that the two groups showed
> essentially no difference either in the speed at which they acquired
> toolmaking skills or in the efficiency with which they did so. Apparently
> learning by silent example is just fine for passing along even
> sophisticated stone tool-making techniques."
>
> Keith Henson
>
>
> ===============================================================
> 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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