From: bpmatt1@aol.com
Date: Fri 25 Mar 2005 - 02:56:40 GMT
Dear Kate and Everyone:
This has been a really interesting discussion. I just wanted to throw
in my two cents. Unexpressed certainly makes more sense than
recessive, but I think there is a third way of looking at this. In
Gregory Batesons work on play he discovered that interactions between
systems evolve. He found that certain stable patterns of behavior are
selected for in any interaction between systems. I think that there is
a danger of subtle reductionism when analyzing things in terms of
memetics. This reductionism occurs when the evolution of ideas is
viewed in a sterile manner, without looking at the interaction between
organisms. An example of this sort of reductionism is the failure of
memetics to look at interspecies communication in a meaningful way.
Gregory Bateson in his books Ecology of the Mind, and Mind and Nature:
Towards a Unity discovered many of the principals of memetics through
human dolphin interactions.
The point is that things that are seen as being caused by an
unexpressed meme are sometimes the interaction of thinking systems,
which form a larger system in which a new behavior arises effecting the
growth of the two interacting systems. If a system of interaction
between the two systems remains stable it will persist. In this way
these interactions form the basis for memetics. Reading what I've
written it sounds hopelessly underdeveloped. Really I was wondering if
anyone on this list has looked at Gregory Bateson and his work, I can't
really develop these ideas myself; I'm bogged down in my work. I'll
try and send a passage from Gregory Batesons book in the next few days
if anyone is interested. Keep up the discussion.
-Matthew Broudy
www.eastasiacenter.net/matthewbroudy
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