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From: Steven Thiele (sthiele@metz.une.edu.au)
Date: Thu 29 Jan 2004 - 01:13:43 GMT
Next message: Steven Thiele: "(no subject)"
Second posting:
It is true that the great bulk of sociology is intellectually empty. It
is a combination of such things as ideology, wishful thinking, careerism
and professionalism. But sociologists are right about one thing -
that social life must be explained in its own terms (just as biologists,
like Darwin and Dawkins, are right when they explain biological life in
biological terms). Memetics can be understood an attempt to do this, but
has too many problems, and this is the case no matter what definition of
memes is accepted. The idea that there is something being replicated, in
some particulate sense, by jumping from brain to brain has problems
enough, but the idea that this something can express itself in such a way
as to generate the basic features of social life, such as complex social
organizations (like the state) or social emotions (like shame and
practices like shaming), makes little sense. For a start off, if memes
operate at the level of individuals, then memetics is immediately
burdened with the problem of individualism - it is impossible to get an
account of social life by adding up the actions of individuals.
The issue of ‘the relations between biological and social life’ is one of
the biggest intellectual challenges remaining. Memetics cannot assist
much in meeting this challenge, except in moving the debate away from
genetics. This is the main contribution of memetics. It is time that
sociologists and biologists/neo-Darwinians got together to work out a
productive strategy for confronting this challenge. The sociologists’
refusal to deal with biology at all (thereby creating the nature/nurture
dualism) is an intellectual scandal, but so is the conceit of
neo-Darwinians that they have the key to understanding organised life in
all its forms. Social life might have evolved out of biological life, but
it is a novel from of life.
Steven Thiele
University of New England
Australia
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: Thu 29 Jan 2004 - 10:32:44 GMT