From: John S. Wilkins (j.wilkins1@uq.edu.au)
Date: Mon 04 Apr 2005 - 02:40:54 GMT
Scott Chase wrote:
>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.
>
>
Dawkins' advisor was Niko Tinbergen, who was a very good friend of Lorenz's:
http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/scientist/niko_tinbergen.html
And Semon's views were widely read and discussed in the period before
the war, as you would know. His term "engramm" was adopted pretty
widely. So I suspect you have uncovered a direct link, a smoking gun, in
the conneciton from Semon to Dawkins.
http://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/Projekte/plex/PLex/Lemmata/E-Lemma/Engramm.htm
http://www.textlog.de/13520.html [from 1927]
>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
>
>
-- John S. Wilkins Postdoctoral Research Fellow Biohumanities Project School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics The University of Queensland Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia Tel +61 7 3365 6348 Mobile 0418 543 856 =============================================================== 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
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