From: John Wilkins (wilkins@wehi.edu.au)
Date: Fri 13 Feb 2004 - 04:48:45 GMT
On Friday, February 13, 2004, at 03:11 PM, Steven Thiele wrote:
> Durkheim spent his entire academic life arguing against individualism,
> which is precisely why he is so important in sociology. Besides, what
> might it mean to say that an idea can be applied without agreeing with
> it? Why is it that whenever supposedly scientific minds begin to look
> at social life that they turn to water, that they begin to repeat all
> the mistakes that sociologists have fallen into? The only way to
> understand social life is to study it, which memeticists (and most
> sociologists - including Durkheim) simply refuse to do. For both,
> inquiry amounts to little more than the collection of bits and pieces
> of information to back up taken for granted assumptions about how the
> social world works.
>
I meant that one need not agree with his ideas on individualism to
agree with his ideas on functionalism, or vice versa (it was exemplia
gratia). Likewise, one can agree with Durkheim on many topic without
having to agree with his view of the biological influence on social
evolution or behaviour. So he thought it was wrong to derive social
laws from biological facts or evolutionary ideas. So what? He was not
god. At that time, social evolution was founded on some truly abysmal
social theories (e.g., Benjamin Kidd) and a false, as it turned out,
view of what evolution was in either domain, owing much more to Lamarck
and the Great Chain than to Darwin. Durkheim was right to reject it.
But not to reject all evolutionary models.
I was merely disputing the claim that if we make use of Durkheim's
sociological ideas we must therefore be opposed to memetics. As it
happens, I think memetics has some underlying problems, but they do not
arise out of the analogy of cultural evolution to biological evolution.
They arise out of a philosophical tendency to objectify abstractions
such as "gene". I have already argued in my major JoM article that what
counts in evolution of culture is any entity at any level, above and
beyond the individual if necessary, that is subjectible to selection.
Memes can be social institutions in my opinion. Or they can be
fragments of ideas in single heads.
You are completely correct that we must study social life rather than
dictate a priori what it must be. Folk sociology is no better than folk
psychology, physics or taxonomy...
-- John S Wilkins Head, Communication Services The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research Parkville, Victoria, Australia =============================================================== 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 13 Feb 2004 - 05:00:23 GMT