From: John S. Wilkins (j.wilkins1@uq.edu.au)
Date: Mon 04 Apr 2005 - 04:20:09 GMT
Scott Chase wrote:
>--- "John S. Wilkins" <j.wilkins1@uq.edu.au> wrote:
>
>
>
>>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]
>>
>>
>>
>Thanks Dr. Wilkins.
>
It's OK. The sheen has worn off the diploma now... call me "John", or
"Dr Arsehole", whichever suits.
>I'm not sure I'd call it a smoking
>gun, but it's suggestive like John Laurent's article
>in 1999:
>
>http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/1999/vol3/laurent_j.html
>
>I wasn't expecting to see "mneme" referred to in
>Lorenz's text. I find his Russian Manuscript a great
>read, especially the way he evolutionizes Kantian
>philosophy.
>
>
His "Kantian synthetic apriori = evolutionary a posteriori" riff is the
foundation for evolutionary epistemology. It's very influential. I'm
going to ckeck this book out. Is it the one you referenced? [Never mind
- just ordered a copy off ABEBOOKS.]
If someone uses "mneme" who is the leader in a field of a student who
later writes "meme", then I think you have sufficient causal chain. It
is inconceivable that Dawkins had never heard it. But that doesn't mean
he did it consciously...
>You should look at it for his views on systematics, if
>you haven't already.
>
What's he say (in brief)? I haven't heard of anything from him.
> He does make me cringe though.
>There are parts of the book that are questionable like
>when he starts talking about the effects of
>domestication.
>
Well, there was a lot of confusion at that time. Not helped by the Nazi
/Volksphilosophie/, I guess. Kant delivered a lecture entitled "On the
various races of Man" in which he says some stuff about classifying by
genealogy rather than appearance, which is pretty sensible (c1775, I
think - until I get a *civilised *computer I can't access my notes),
which would be fine except that Blumenbach took it further and developed
the "modern" racist typology out of it.
-- 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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