From: Van oost Kenneth (kennethvanoost@belgacom.net)
Date: Mon 02 Feb 2004 - 15:33:39 GMT
----- Original Message -----
Steven Thiele,
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.
<< Can 't agree more !
The main problem to move memetics ahead, is its doped tendency to stick to the biological
analogy proposed by Dawkins. To get evidence we must leave this assumption.
Furthermore, memetics must leave its analogical /biological explanation alltogether and
must come at ease with things like breaching the dogma's of biology, lamarckism and
individualism.
Regards,
Kenneth
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