From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu 05 May 2005 - 03:18:05 GMT
--- Bill Spight <bspight@pacbell.net> wrote:
> Dear Keith,
>
> > One the other hand, perhaps you are referring to
> language shifting
> > generation by generation. People who are up on
> this (such as my
> > wife, an English major) say there was more
> evolution in the language
> > between Chaucer and Shakespeare than from has
> happened since (about
> > twice as long).
> >
>
> I believe it. Printing may be a factor, no?
>
How much of culture is actually in printed form?
Linguistic evolution is important, yes, and maybe
partly dependent on innate cognitive modules, but
didn't culture precede the advented of printing? After
the advent of printing, was non-printed culture
eclipsed?
The reason I ask is that I'm thinking in terms of
Bloch's argument against linguistically based culture
in his _How They Think We Think_. Much could be
non-linguistic and not address by the word string you
and Keith are looking at (regardless of the advent of
printing).
There's lots that words cannot address conceptually as
Bloch points out and transformation of cultural
content may occur due to the sender taking something
out of procedural memory and putting it into
declarative memory using words then the receiver
intepreting those words which then get stored
eventually as procedural memory (or
implicit-explicit-----explicit-implicit). Sounds like
a barrier for replicationists to cross to me.
OTOH how much is passed between members of a culture
without making it to the declartive stage? How much
implicit stuff gets passed? How much misunderstanding
arises because the reciver makes the wrong inference
as to implication or intention of sender?
>
> > To normalize for comparison, you would figure out
> bits of change per
> > generation since at the root of it, genes and
> memes are both
> > information.
>
> Barry goes on to say, "The influenza virus mutates
> so fast that 99
> percent of the 100,000 to 1 million new viruses that
> burst out of a cell
> . . . are too defective to infect another cell and
> reproduce again." If
> we consider that one generation, almost all of the
> "children" are
> mutants. It's hard to mutate faster than that.
>
Influenza virus has a definite format, does it not?
One can look at a molecular biology or immunology text
and see an idealized representation of a virus and as
Derek has pointed out mutation rates for viruses,
unlike, memes can be measured. All you're doing is
sporting an analogy, which Derek effectively
torpedoed.
Delius presents what he thought to be an idealized
representation of a neuromeme in his papers. That
representation was unimpressive and nowhere close to
the clarity with which viruses are represented in
standard texts. It was like, oh yeah that's what a
synaptically based meme might look like. Calvin does
better with his hexagonally mosaic thingies, but
Hebbian cell assemblies make more sense as ways of
representing cultural info than viruses
since...ummm..culture does depend upon human memory in
the real world. Ideas as viruses are just a fanciful
way of looking at culture as contagious.
One can even conceptualize notions of antigenic shift
and drift with an influenza virus, which is not
possible for the meme. It's an empty shell of an
analogy with nothing analogous to base pairs to go
inside or even an "envelope" to surround it.
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