From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon 04 Apr 2005 - 05:05:58 GMT
--- "John S. Wilkins" <j.wilkins1@uq.edu.au> wrote:
> 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.]
>
I've got it checked out. Not sure if I'll buy it,
mainly because, like de Bivort, my shelf space is
getting REALLY limited. But it's a lot more in depth
than _King Solomon's Ring_ nonetheless. There's some
stuff that's crystal clear in that Russ. MS book.
>
> 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...
>
Yes mneme was possibly the ethological "meme pool" so
to speak with Lorenz mentioning it in his Russian
manuscript, BUT if that was the only time Lorenz made
use of the concept (as a minor aside), it was
published post-humously. I'm not familiar with his
entire corpus. Plus we need to ask which ethologists
may have used the term besides Lorenz, if at all. If
they were German, did Dawkins read much German
literature on ethology etc...
I have pondered Dawkins's familiarity with the memory
research literature. That could be a separate issue
than his familiarity with the ethological literature
and ethologists' familiarity with the "mneme" or
"engram". Memory researchers would probably be
expected have more familiarity with these terms.
It could be just a linguistic similarity separated by
one letter "n" between meme and mneme and nothing
more. I'm open to alternative hypotheses. Didn't
Minksy use neme in his work? William Durham offers a
rundown of related terms (including JZ Young's mnemon)
in _Coevolution_.
Then we have:
Semon- mneme
Young- mnemon
Dawkins- meme
Minsky- neme
>
> >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.
>
Ughh! That's kinda beyond my comfort zone.
>
> > 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.
>
Ironically Semon, who was Jewish, was affiliated with
Haeckel, the ubermonist, but that was before the
madness of Nazi Germany erupted. One of these days
I'll re-read Schacter's and Gasman's books on Semon
and Haeckel respectively.
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Personals - Better first dates. More second dates.
http://personals.yahoo.com
===============================================================
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 : Mon 04 Apr 2005 - 05:23:39 GMT