From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun 24 Apr 2005 - 00:43:53 GMT
--- William Benzon <bbenzon@mindspring.com> wrote:
> on 4/23/05 2:56 PM, Scott Chase at
> osteopilus@yahoo.com wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> >>
> >> The substrate is clearly significant: information
> >> will be transmitted
> >> more/less effectively depending on the medium in
> >> which it's realized; it
> >> will also be more/less powerful in exerting its
> >> potential effects. But
> >> Aunger doesn't convince me that this means the
> same
> >> information (meme)
> >> cannnot "really" be realized across different
> media.
> >>
> > Well when he's discussing abstract stuff about
> memes
> > he's not causing me as much grief as when he
> starts
> > goofing on molecular biology and now, it seems,
> basic
> > zoology (head-desk, head-desk, repeat 10 times). I
> had
> > cleaned the slate and he goes and does it again.
>
> Get used to it. You might consider some thick
> padding on the top of your
> desk. OTOH, if you put a bunch of rocks on your desk
> top the constant
> beating might be sufficient to render you
> insensitive to Aunger's lapses of
> fact, common sense, and internal consistency.
>
> But I'll give you a little preview. In his first
> chapter on the neural
> theory he announces his Big Discovery, that the
> neural meme is not a
> physical structure in the nervous system, but the
> state of a physical
> structure he calls a node. In one of the later
> chapters he suggests that
> memes can be modeled with stick and ball structures.
>
> Doh!
>
Well he has his flashes of brilliance. I think his
section on redundancy of neural coding from page 211-3
isn't so bad. He even uses this as a chance to present
an alternative to Blackmore's memetic drive theory. He
does point out that duplication of neural states
allows for a diffuse nature, but then I see his casual
dismissal of Lashlley's engram as an error of
ommission since Lashley entertained a concept of
reduplication that seems to dovetail with how Aunger
is getting at his form if distributed representaion.
Aunger points to a redundnacy of the genetic code, but
I think he could have benefitted from incorpoaryion of
Susumu Ohno's theories on duplication and divergence
here.
I may be off my rocker on this, but I'm intuiting that
both Lashley's reduplication concept and Ohno's
evolution by gene duplication concept are both
relevant to what Aunger is arguing. He fails to
address Lashley sufficiently beyond casually
dismissing him and he doesn't even mention Ohno that I
can tell. Redundancy is an important concept to ponder
and I will give Aunger credit where it's due.
This section "Reasons for replicating" does stand out
as one of the better parts of his book. The rival
hypothesis he posits to Blackmore's theory is also
provocative here and shouldn't be overlooked.
He has many errors of commission in this book, but yes
there are some gems, even if they come with their own
Persian flaws of omission.
>
> > When
> > he's talking about the molecular bases of memory,
> > which in itself is an important topic I need
> seriously
> > to remediate myself on, he totally fries my brain
> with
> > a category error of serious proportions in
> zoology. He
> > equates the genus *Aplysia* which is a model
> organism
> > for memory research with the nematode. He says (p.
> > 190): "A number of studies, involving animals as
> > varied as the fruit fly (*Drosophila*), nematode
> worm
> > (*Aplysia*), and mouse...".
>
> Details, details, great minds working on great
> theories don't sweat the
> details. As long as it sounds good . . . >
If a non-anthropologist were to write a book about
anthopology that states that Tasmanians had TV sets
but lost these after they migrated to Tasmania from
Australia on jet skis (which they also lost in their
tool box) or if someone were to discuss an out of
America hypothesis that reverses the human trajectory
across the land bridge into Asia, Europe and Africa,
that would be a howler right? That's just about as bad
as what he said about ribosomes and base pairing,
especially given that he was presenting DNA
replication as an example of his larger general view.
His mistakes on *Aplysia* and Galton's relation to
Darwin aren't quite that bad but add up.
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