From: Scott Chase (ecphoric@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat 04 Feb 2006 - 00:58:04 GMT
>From: Derek Gatherer <d.gatherer@vir.gla.ac.uk>
>Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>Subject: Re: new review of memetics/sociobiology/EP
>Date: Fri, 03 Feb 2006 08:41:41 +0000
>
>Thanks Robin
>
>Nice to see you are still with the list. You are right about "hidden
>hand". I can't remember exactly where I got it from (David Hull?), but a
>quick check on google seems to indicate that it is from Adam Smith, and
>therefore probably means something slightly different to what I intended.
>
Maybe. My memory is that in classic liberal economics it was an *invisible
hand* so your term is a bit different worded, but not sure how close in
meaning. It could shimmer forth from the walls of Plato's cave or off the
pages of Kant with his phenomenal versus noumenal dichotomy. With Freud we
had the manifest versus latent.
People enthralled with an explanatory framework may tend to portay the
naysayers as being under the power of their chosen idee fixe. Jungians would
ascribe archetypes as the hidden factor underlying human behaviors, evolved
modes of thought that influence myths and dreams. Freud might have ascribed
it to latent sexual material long ago repressed.
Very good article. I should have expected as much from you. You keep
memetics at a critical arm's length and aren't all starry eyed about your
approach. You do a good job of comparing sociobiology, EP and memetics,
reminiscent of Laland and Brown's comprehensive _Sense and Nonsense_.
Just mentioning Huxley as a predecessor gives you kudos in my book.
Your discussion of the trait-individual problem gives much food for thought,
especially when pondering how memory units and behaviors could relate to
individuals and how long these things last versus the genes carried by an
individual. The word evanescence may be useful here.
When you talk about EP's search for universals, this was the overlap wih
Jungian thought that I was pointing out to Keith, in that Jung was an
evolutionary psychologist long before the term was formalized.
The concepts you list citing Jones have some Kantian undercurrents, time and
space, etc. These categories were evolutionized by Lorenz (the grandpappy of
sociobiologist and EP thought) and encultured by Durkheim (the SSSM bogeyman
of the EP'ers).
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