From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon 04 Apr 2005 - 01:54:48 GMT
I found this little aside by Lorenz most interesting,
given that, despite his dark National Socialism
related past, he reached the prominence as an
ethologist to get a Nobel Prize. Lorenz was talking
about learning and memory when he wrote during his
stint in a Russian POW camp (p. 163):
[KL] "In an objective sense, a "mneme"- a memory of
what has happened previously- is already present
wherever the behavior of an organism is influenced *by
what it has just done*." [KL]
I wonder how Lorenz had been introduced to the concept
of "mneme" (the "mneme" meme)?. I see no apparent
reference to Semon nor is Semon's work in the
bibliography.
Here we see an ethologist using the term "mneme". I'm
not sure how often this word was used in ethological
circles. Dawkins himself emerged from the ethological
scene, so this could be an interesting thing to
ponder. If its ethological use was confined to
Lorenz's Russian Manuscript then it was lost until
unearthed in 1990.
ref:
Konrad Lorenz. 1996. The Natural Science of the Human
Species. The MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts
for more on Lorenz's controversial past:
Franz de Waal. 2001. The Ape and the Sushi Master.
Basic Books. New York
Ute Deichmann. 1996. Biologists Under Hitler. Harvard
University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts
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