From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue 19 Apr 2005 - 22:35:20 GMT
--- "Price, Ilfryn" <I.Price@shu.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>
> Kate wrote
>
> >
>
> I don't think it's off the topic: I'm pretty sure it
> is a root to memes.
> As you say, the capacity to represent, to carry
> the idea from one
> context to another, is crucial. I believe that
> humans' (almost
> certainly unique) ability to metarepresent - or in
> other words to carry
> the idea from one representational system to
> another; to reflect on
> *how* it is represented - is the key to memes
> themselves. But there
> seem to be degrees/types of representation, with
> some creatures capable
> of much simpler types than others, and I'm sure
> there's a spectrum here.>
>
>
> Yes, we can verbalise a greater range of sounds and
> make artefacts - the naked, talking, tool making
> ape. Those abilities may be
> exaptions but they created an environment for
> memetic replication not apparently matched elsewhere
> in our planet's biosphere. The
> rest is history (or pre history).
>
>
So would you agree with Gould that our large, complex
brain that itself was crafted by selection in
ancestral environments may have some byproducts that
in themselves are nonaptive and could be co-opted into
various uses (perhaps as exaptions or as functional
shifts)?
If cultural changes themselves were a byproduct of a
ccomplex brain with lots of architectural space to
doodle with, maybe replication of cultural products or
mentifacts could be one such nonaptive byproduct and
thus make Blackmore's memetic drive hypothesis
unnecessary? Here the brain would already be big and
culture secondary a a result.
Sorry for the hand-waving, but I'm just aproaching
this at the "just so" level without anything handy to
use as a good example. Due to Pinker/Chomsky language
might be out as something that can be explained away
by memes, but perhaps religion could be somewhere to
look for answers. Gould would have kicked me, but if
we could say that the EEA resulted in some serious
modularity of the mind, these modules would have
possible ways of being co-opted or might have
nonaptive consequences. Gould looked to Freud for the
idea that our large noggins resulted in our ancestors
contemplating mortality and looking for stories to
make the uncertainities of the world make sense. Gould
would have kicked me for suggesting cultural
"evolution", but perhaps here we can see the emergence
of culture and certain mental and/or social level
stuff strarting to accrete that might not have
developed the ability to replicate in most instances,
but maybe sometimes. I'm thinking of Dan Sperber and
Maurice Bloch's arguments about transformation and
re-creation as a case where replication doesn't apply.
I think Sperber says that replication would be a
special case when transformation nears zero.
So all these ideas about mortality get passed around
from generation to generation and myths get started,
but anyone who has reat Bartlett's _Remembering_
realizes how stories can shift around when passed down
the line. If there are innate schema that these
stories can "attract" to, maybe these themes are less
apt to be distorted (hero, wise old man, mothers,
etc.)
Or two cultures can converge upon a flood myth, like
the stories of Noah and Gilgamesh, or was the latter
borrowed by the tellers of the Noah story? Any place
where people live along a river prone to flooding is
going to incorporate floods into there mythology, just
like they will objectify the sun and moon and animals.
This convergence wouldn't be the evoked culture that
ev psychers talk about, but only a matter of
ecological convergence. Evoked culture might share
similarities due to homologous mental structure
(paging Dr. Jung) and elements of myths would reflect
these slight innate tendencies. The differences in
myth would be developed and transmitted within a
culture via a combination of vertical, oblique, and
horizontal means. Yet, transmission does not imply
replication. Transmission is necessary but not
sufficient for replication to occur. Looking to
Sperber and Bloch, tranformation or recreation might
be the norm and replication the exception.
Sorry I must have misplaced my typically critical
demeanor somewhere, maybe I dropped it next to the
refrigerator.
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