From: Wade T. Smith (wade.t.smith@verizon.net)
Date: Tue 08 Jul 2003 - 14:25:05 GMT
On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, at 05:39 AM, Aaron wrote:
> Yes, [the concept of a meme] is a little complicated. Hence, I also
> define the term less formally as "a self-propagating idea." That gets
> the gist of it across for those readers who are not looking for a
> formal technical definition, and is the way I handled it in my book.
Even as a layman, used and susceptible to familiarly offered images and
expressions, the scene thus painted of an idea with legs and gonads or
hermaphroditic contortions disturbed me. Something else is happening
here, I said, in order to move ideas like logs in a river and get them
downstream. Firstly, there's the damn stream. That's not
self-propagating ideas at all....
> When boys make sticks into gun-like weapons, they are still relying on
> replicated inculcation and imitation of ideas about what guns are and
> what they do. So there is at least some role of cultural inculcation
> and imitation. Many girls and women over the past century have shown a
> particular fascination with diamonds. This also must involve
> considerable non-innate influences even if the whole phenomenon
> depends on innate cravings for such things as food security, status,
> mate loyalty, or mate providing abilities.
It has been shown to be inordinately difficult if not impossible to
define and delineate gender differences- certainly to reduce them to
biological origins and vectors. That human development, and therefore
gender identity, is tied hand and foot to cultural environment is also
impossible to ignore, and yet impossible to fully explore. I know there
aren't too many Pinker* fans here, but, hey, the guy has a point to
make and it's a good one.
Joe says-
> However, the relationships between the ideas and their respective
> environing cognitive gestalts would most likely be much more alike
> than either the ideas or the cognitive environments taken alone
> (simpliciter).
This is another way of explaining the eliciting containment and
maintainence conditions of the venue. This model does strive for
simplicity, after all....
And Vincent says-
> 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).
I'm not convinced there are any skills that can be learned
non-demonstratively. And I do mean even things that are _explained_ via
speech or in text without demonstrational actions. (Kids like
pictures....) And not only simply as observer- read as much as you like
about riding a bike- once you actually get on one, you will still need
to demonstrate to yourself that you know how to balance on it. (We do
things to discover what we can do. That's the way the body works.
Different every single damn time.) No matter how many times I read a
recipe for making omelets, I never really knew how to do it (to do it
again), until I watched Julia do her omelet show**. Did she 'transfer
the meme of making omelets' to me? Or did I observe a performance, one
using a skill set I could also manage, within a shared venue which
enabled understanding, and then perform myself? Yeah, that one, that is
what happened. Come on over for breakfast, I'll do it again.
- Wade
*
http://query.nytimes.com/search/full-
page?res=9A06E4D71E38F930A25753C1A9649C8B63 - "Pinker is mindful that
environmental infusion is necessary to activate or realize every
biological trait. Evolution produces dispositions that expect, as it
were, a certain range of experience. From the point of view of modern
biology, this principle of gene-environment codependence has a
perfectly pedestrian ring. What keeps the sides at war remains: With a
given trait, how much can be attributed to genes and how much to
environment? And is it even meaningful to attempt to answer this
question? Pinker concedes that many experimental studies suggest a
surprisingly plastic cerebral cortex, but he short-circuits the
implications of this admission by relocating most hard wiring to the
midbrain, from which basic emotional patterns stem. Yet one would have
thought that the evolutionary acquisitions making us specifically human
have a primary locus in the cortex -- high intelligence and language,
for instance. Gene-environment interaction is dynamic, and the
components only artificially separable. The experience that evoked
Darwin's genius would merely have made Newton seasick. Genes count, but
differently in different environments. Moreover, the brain's neural
construction is far too complex to be genetically preplanned in any
detail; so early experience and chance must sculpture the synaptic
connections in the developing infant."
** "In 1961, the year Julia Child moved to Cambridge, she was scheduled
to be interviewed on WGBH-TV about her cookbook. But Child had other
plans, and she insisted on bringing eggs, a pan, a copper bowl, and a
whisk. She wanted to show the world how to make a proper omelet -- the
French way. That omelet was Child's TV debut. She would go on to become
public television's first chef, and her show The French Chef would
revolutionize how Americans cooked."
===============================================================
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