Re: Orthologs was RS

From: Chris Taylor (chris.taylor@ebi.ac.uk)
Date: Sat 06 May 2006 - 00:00:33 GMT

  • Next message: Robin Faichney: "Re: RS"

    > increased status has not resulted in a large number of extra
    > wives

    ROFL you're not going to the right conferences :D

    What's interesting in biology is the large numbers of women and the lack of concern about that -- we're easily the most balanced of the hard sciences; that also means we have our fair share of alpha females...

    Which is the thing about the genetic angle -- I think that the analysis of behaviours with reference to the period when our social roots were really established for the later homo spp. is useful, but what we should think about is a kind of deep-time analysis of _meme_ evolution throughout -- how would the fundamental concepts established in primal human groups evolve and what might we expect to see now; same basic analysis, just a different inheritance model. James Dean (for e.g.) has in effect reproduced despite living a rubbish live from a gene-centric pov. iyswim. okay a bit obscure.

    When similar environments produce similar behaviours in women
    (alphas) I fear the genetic EP argument becomes uncomfortably complex? Might we also look to a form of memetics here? Might we more usefully consider how the perhaps necessary structures imposed by physical form, basic midbrain stuff (face recognition being about as sophisticated as it gets) and emotions etc.
    (yawning, anyone?), along with lifestyle in early hominid groups might have shaped their core cultural values (cities make people) and what that means for our own? I'm a great believer that where a memetic transmission mechanism works any genetic analogue would be lost (redundancy = drift) so I'm interested in how particular situations over the long term might make us the society we are given our successive environments and equally, how minds from that background respond in 'realtime' in given
    (maybe stressful for e.g.) situations.

    Tired. Warbling. nn.

    Cheers, Chris.

    Keith Henson wrote:
    > At 10:33 AM 5/5/2006 +0100, Chris wrote:
    >
    > snip
    >
    >> Now despite that rant I'm split on this; as a memeticist of sorts I am
    >> delighted to see all this novelty springing from this (linguistic)
    >> innovation; just like bicycles or butterflies or brands -- innovate,
    >> capitalise, make variations on the basic theme to create/discover/fill
    >> as many niches as possible blah blah blah. And I do get a good laugh
    >> out of some of them. It's all fun in the end, with that hat on.
    >>
    >> However, I simultaneously see it as misleading nonsense that is
    >> deployed in an attempt to smear kudos on otherwise mundane work. I
    >> don't claim that the work being done is valueless, just that this
    >> stupid distraction of delineating and rebranding what is fundamentally
    >> just a region of the multidimensional bioscience continuum is
    >> confusing to some, wastes space and time and generates ridiculous
    >> turf/ownership scraps where someone will invent a new omics just
    >> because the one they would have gone for is 'controlled' by a big name
    >> they don't like, or simply didn't involve them from the start.
    >>
    >> This is as cringe-making as the physicists with that 'brane thing --
    >> basically it's an attempt to be 'cool' in some weird way, to appear
    >> cutting edge and savvy. Let's leave 'cool' to the teen magazines.
    >
    > I have over the last ten years or so added this big hammer, evolutionary
    > psychology, to my tool box. Admitting that to a guy with a hammer
    > everything looks like a nail, let me take a swat at it.
    >
    > "Cool," "big name," "turf/ownership scraps" all relate to primate
    > status. It is easy to see how a psychological trait to seek attention
    > (where the integral of attention is status) would arise--in males
    > anyway, i.e., no status, no nooky, no nooky, no kids.
    >
    > Now speaking as the person who coined "memeoid" and "capture-bonding" (I
    > took out the sorry numbers they show on Google) I must say that there is
    > a flavor of status associated with having done so. The fact that the
    > increased status has not resulted in a large number of extra wives,
    > "extra pair" matings and dozens of children is *entirely* due to the
    > mismatch between the EEA and the modern environment.
    >
    > Well, to be honest, it might also have something to do with spending my
    > spare time staring at a tube rather than picking up chicks at singles
    > bars. :-)
    >
    > But you get the drift, it's a feature, not a bug, and you will just have
    > to deal with it.
    >
    > Best wishes,
    >
    > 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
    > 

    -- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  chris.taylor@ebi.ac.uk
  http://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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