From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Fri 23 Jan 2004 - 02:44:03 GMT
At 11:05 PM 21/01/04 -0800, M Lissack wrote:
>thought experiments with "obvious results" (your words Keith) are not
>demonstrable ways for a "science" to illustrate how it makes a pragmatic
>difference
That's not always the case. The most famous thought experiment of all time
is Shrodinger's Cat (1935),
http://www.tu-harburg.de/rzt/rzt/it/QM/cat.html. Not only is quantum
mechanics science par excellence but it underlies all of the pragmatic
solid state engineering of the last half of the 20th century. (This
happens to be my professional field.)
>Bruce's challenges are about the role of memetics as a useful science
I am not so certain that memetics is a large enough topic to *be* a useful
science by itself. The best analogy is probably genetics, where we are
concerned with two aspects, the effects variations in genes have at the
level of an organism and the rate of growth or decline in a population of
various genes as a result of selection (population genetics). By analogy,
memetics would be concerned with what a meme does to make a difference in
an organism's behavior and how (or why) the meme behind that behavior
becomes more or less common in a population. Population memetics if you
will.
The answer to how and why a meme becomes more common requires a deep
understanding of human psychological traits. Since those psychological
traits were selected during our evolutionary history, evolutionary
psychology is key to understanding the differential selection of
memes. Memetics not just Darwin applied to ideas, but Darwin applied twice!
The math behind both genetics and memetics generates S curves where the
early part of the S curve is exponential. The exact same math describes
epidemics.
Memetic models predict that potato washing by monkeys would be adopted on
an S curve. (Anyone have the numbers?) There is little chance of
resolving it in the geologic record, but I would assume the hand ax (killer
Frisbee) was adopted by our remote ancestors on an initial exponential
curve which then flattened out for the next million years before declining
to few or zero practitioners (the discus might be a
non-functional-for-hunting remnant).
We do have historical records for the adoption of life insurance. I
researched this while looking into the adoption of cryonics before I
started writing on memetics and found that the curves for England, France
and the US were parallel on semi-log paper with the US following England by
about 20 years and France trailing England by almost 70 years. (If memory
serves, it has been a very long time.)
Of course, genetic effects are embedded in the whole of biology and
behavior variations are embedded in biology and its extensions into the
psychology of social primates. Thus I have found a memetic model to be of
use in stating and understanding problems from evolutionary psychology.
If someone wanted data to support memetic models of infectious behavior,
you could probably find it in the records for the major
sports--particularly basketball which is not much over 100 years
old. There is a thumbnail sketch
here: http://www.ku.edu/heritage/graphics/people/naismith.html
>rather than as a philosphical school of belief
>Your example is great for the latter and useless for the former
I find this amusing for reasons that will be obvious to most list readers.
Keith Henson
PS I have a copy of Bruce's paper now, but will probably hold off on
commenting for a bit.
===============================================================
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 archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri 23 Jan 2004 - 05:46:34 GMT