Re: what is a meme?

From: Scott Chase (ecphoric@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed 04 Feb 2004 - 04:48:36 GMT

  • Next message: derek gatherer: "RE: groupthink gauntlet: MacArthur's ill-fated drive toward the Yalu"

    >From: Keith Henson <hkhenson@rogers.com>
    >Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    >To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
    >Subject: Re: what is a meme?
    >Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2004 21:19:22 -0500
    >
    >At 02:21 PM 03/02/04 +0000, Scott wrote:
    >
    >snip (amusing rant hard to take entirely seriously)
    >
    I cannot take credit for writing the below quoted material. I believe Chris Taylor is the critic of ev psych you are responding to...
    >
    >>Also, under AOB, I'd like to completely dissociate myself from the dark
    >>side of biology trying to _help_ explain all this, i.e. evolpsych, which
    >>should imho confine itself to studies of brainstem-related stuff (primal
    >>fear, basic pattern recognition and so on), and what effect that has on
    >>minds constructed of memes (the commensalistic/parasitic,
    >>telencephalically based us).
    >
    >But if I were to take the last paragraph seriously, I would have to object
    >that evolutionary psychology per se does not study *anything.*
    >
    >"The goal of research in evolutionary psychology is to discover and
    >understand the design of the human mind. Evolutionary psychology is an
    >approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary
    >biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind. It
    >is not an area of study, like vision, reasoning, or social behavior. It is
    >a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within
    >it.
    >
    >"In this view, the mind is a set of information-processing machines that
    >were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our
    >hunter-gatherer ancestors. This way of thinking about the brain, mind, and
    >behavior is changing how scientists approach old topics . . . ."
    >
    >
    Chris would probably say that his brand of memetics is more apt than ev psych for the task of explaining everything, where I would chastise both of you for your biases against social science that have been aired recently.

    _________________________________________________________________ Scope out the new MSN Plus Internet Software — optimizes dial-up to the max!
       http://join.msn.com/?pgmarket=en-us&page=byoa/plus&ST=1Ÿ

    =============================================================== 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 : Wed 04 Feb 2004 - 05:00:47 GMT