Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id MAA00309 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Mon, 24 Jul 2000 12:23:09 +0100 Message-ID: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D310174594C@inchna.stir.ac.uk> From: Vincent Campbell <v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk> To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Subject: RE: Gender Bias For Memes Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2000 12:20:41 +0100 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Kenneth,
As you've probably gathered from other posts, I'm not exactly a fan of
Chris' theory.
On the other hand there are quite a few areas where men and women display
differential performance, suggesting something is different about
male/female information processing. I'm thinking here of those experiments,
for example, where people are asked to draw a line halfway down on an
outline of a tipped bottle, which men and women do in different ways (I
forget which way round it is- as ever the detail escapes me!), one gender
tending to draw the line horizontally across the page- the correct way, the
other drawing the line horizontally across the bottle.
Just how far you can take such differences I don't know, and whether they
have an impact on how memes affect people, again I don't know. Of course,
one of the problems of asking these kind of questions, is that they go
against the dominant train of modern liberal societies which desires that
people are treated as individuals not simply as examples of 'man' or
'woman'. Conducting studies of, for example, gender bias in propsenity for
spreading urban legends say, might get some people's backs up!
That's not to say it couldn't or shouldn't be done though, particularly as
it might be a good initial step in getting memetics some empirical data to
work on (that's if agreement is ever reached as to what a meme is, and
therefore which phenomena 'count' in memetics).
Vincent
> ----------
> From: Kenneth Van Oost
> Reply To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Sent: Friday, July 21, 2000 5:14 pm
> To: memetics
> Subject: Gender Bias For Memes
>
> Vincent,
>
> Take a look at this
>
> Male Female
>
> Sameness Difference
> order change
> single context ' fuzz the bounderies '
> schizophrenia depression
> suicide (guns) suicide attempt (poison)
> action language
> instinct raison
> consensus opportunism
> general special
> dasein mitzein
> Darwin ? Lamarck ?
> (objects) (waves) relationships
> genetc ? memetic ?
> la nature naturelle ? la nature artificiel ?
>
> from out these very general discriptions we can easily assume that the
> male/
> female distinction has a solid bias to continu on !!
>
> Although both categories are as well male as female oriented we can
> suppose
> that on the ' original ' genetic/ memetic bias the discriptions are more
> male/
> more female processed and so the memes which evolved from this would too
> !?
>
> What do you think !?
>
> With thanks to Chris Lofting, I used some ideas...
>
> regards,
>
> Kenneth
>
> (I am, because we are)
>
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