From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Wed 20 Jul 2005 - 14:13:18 GMT
At 10:10 AM 20/07/05 +0100, Kate wrote:
snip
>This must tie into the suicide bombers' mentality somewhere along the
>line. If memetics is true then it must be able to account for what's
>going on there, which is surely memetic to some extent. Any insights, anyone?
"Keith Henson has coined the name `memeoids' for `victims that have been
taken over by a meme to the extent that their own survival becomes
inconsequential ... You see lots of these people on the evening news from
such places as Belfast or Beirut'. "
End notes Second Ed. Selfish Gene.
"Memeoid" is descriptive, but memetics is small a frame to get to the root
of *why* people are susceptible to lethal memes, particularly ones that
lead to behavior such as becoming a suicide bomber.
Understanding *why* takes evolutionary psychology to explain or at least
try to explain where humans got these really strange psychological traits.
I have been ranting about EP, conditional behavioral switches and why
humans are susceptible to certain classes of memes at some times and not
others for years on this list.
It's not a comfortable subject.
Keith Henson
===============================================================
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 : Wed 20 Jul 2005 - 14:33:10 GMT