Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id CAA07874 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 20 Sep 2000 02:34:01 +0100 User-Agent: Microsoft Outlook Express Macintosh Edition - 5.0 (1513) Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 21:33:43 -0400 Subject: Re: empirical "memetics" From: William Benzon <bbenzon@mindspring.com> To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Message-ID: <B5ED7EB3.49AF%bbenzon@mindspring.com> In-Reply-To: <MailDrop1.2d7j-PPC.1000920095232@mac463.wehi.edu.au> Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> From: John Wilkins <wilkins@wehi.EDU.AU>
> Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 09:52:32 +1100
> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Subject: Re: empirical "memetics"
>
[snip
>>
>> And I ask this because, dammit, I don't see it. Improvements and
>> alterations are not necessarily evolutions, IMHO.
>
> This is the reason why I am doing my PhD on species concepts rather than
> on cultural concepts - and my answer is that culture speciates when
> traditions split. When the making of automobiles is no longer taught as
> part of horse carriage making, then automotive engineering has become a
> separate tradition and thus must be classified as a distinct lineage.
>
> As Hull has argued, the fundamental ontological category in evolution is
> the lineage.
Very interesting. That certainly makes sense in the biological case.
Though what does Hull do about hybrids? I've read, here and there, for
example, that a quarter of all naturally-occurring plant species are
hybrids.
I'm not quite sure what it implies for culture. The fact is, cultural
lineages are very leaky. In the extreme, we have creolization in language,
where a new language emerges from two or more parent languages within two
human generations. Assigning the new language to any of the parent lineages
is somewhat arbitrary and obscures significant relationships. [Comparative
and historical linguistics pretends that linguistics lineages only split,
but they deliberately adopt methods that are designed to produce this
result.]
The same thing happens in other cultural domains. I'm particularly
interested in jazz music, for example. It doesn't make sense to assign it
either to a lineage originating in Africa or one originating in Europe, but
it has ancestors in both places.
--William Benzon, Ph. D. 708 Jersey Avenue, Apt. 2A Jersey City, NJ 07302 201 217-1010
You won't get a wild heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds. --George Ives
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