From: Chris Taylor (christ@ebi.ac.uk)
Date: Thu 05 May 2005 - 12:44:30 GMT
Isn't this kind of like looking at wasp nests and trying to deduce
something about wasp evolution? (not unfeasible, but far from
straightforward).
Cheers, Chris.
Kate Distin wrote:
> Derek Gatherer wrote:
>
>>
>>>
>>> Well, lack of precision does not preclude comparison, it just makes
>>> it coarse grained. For example, take this quote from Chaucer:
>>>
>>> I warne yow wel, it is no childes pley.
>>>
>>> Eight memes (lexemes), counting 'childes pley' as one, six mutations
>>> (including short to long 'i' in 'childes') in over more than 600
>>> years. Millions of replications, at least. That's gotta be slower
>>> than the flu, no?
>>
>>
>>
>> 600 years is a mere 20 human generations.
>
>
> But meme generations aren't often the same as gene generations. 600
> years could be thousands of meme generations.
>
>> 20 flu generations is probably less than 60 days. How much does a flu
>> virus mutate in 60 days? In any case, to what extent are
>> orthographical changes cultural mutations?
>
>
> They're more changes in the way that culture is represented than in the
> culture itself. The meaning of the phrase doesn't change when you move
> it into modern English; the information it carries remains the same.
>
>> Does that not assume that culture is somehow coded in language?
>> Couldn't it be coded in something else (eg a mentalese?) or not coded
>> at all?
>>
>>
>
> Coded in lots of different ways, yes.
>
> I'd also question the assumption that the phrase consists of 8 memes
> just because it has 8 lexemes. I'm not saying that each word could not
> be a meme, in certain contexts, but that functionally this particular
> phrase actually carries only one or at the most two bits of information
> (a self-referential statement that the phrase is a warning, and the
> warning itself).
>
> Dawkins has an example in The Blind Watchmaker about the evolution of
> language, plotted in terms of word divergence, which I think falls prey
> to the same problems. Obviously there's a lot more to language than its
> constituent words (e.g. grammatical rules, etc.).
>
> Kate
>
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>
-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Chris Taylor (christ@ebi.ac.uk) HUPO PSI: GPS -- psidev.sf.net ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ =============================================================== 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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