Re: DNA Culture .... Trivia?

From: William Benzon (bbenzon@mindspring.com)
Date: Fri Jan 12 2001 - 14:42:42 GMT

  • Next message: Lawrence de Bivort: "Re: DNA Culture .... Trivia?"

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    Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 09:42:42 -0500
    Subject: Re: DNA Culture .... Trivia?
    From: William Benzon <bbenzon@mindspring.com>
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    on 1/12/01 7:04 AM, Vincent Campbell at v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk wrote:

    >>
    > That's not what I meant. I meant that it opens people interested in
    > memetics up to other discipline's established paradigms that they might not
    > have heard of.

    But I don't see this happening at all. What I see is people from biology
    and physics and computing adopting the memetics party-line and just sticking
    with it and elaborating on it. They do not go out to media studies or
    literary history or comparative religion or cultural anthroplogy and really
    learn something about how those folks think about culture. They just start
    inventing memetic just-so stories.

    Their favorite stories seem to be about religion and cultures. And the
    stories they tell indicate that they have a very shallow conception of human
    nature and society. The orthodox memetic position is that the most
    important thing about religion is that it is irrational. That's what they
    want to explain. How do they explain it? By saying those pesky memes are
    working juju on the minds of otherwise unsuspecting adults.

    That's a pathetic explanation. It tells me these people simply do not have
    any deep conception of human nature. They aren't interested in explaining
    human behavior. Rather, they want to explain it away by palming it off on
    memes.

    >
    > It seems to me that critics of memetics assume that they know
    > everything about every discipline and those of us who don't should be
    > chastised for not knowing everything.

    I make no such assumption. But I know enough about literature, art, music,
    cognitive and neuropsyhology (and have published on several of these) to
    know that memeticists don't know much about those things.

    >
    > Besides none of these fields are free from uncertainties or debates,

    Right, they're all in trouble. But I don't see that memetic pseudo-science
    will be any help.

    Look, memetics has been out there for what, 25 years? What substantive
    results has it produced? It's not as though it were an obscure idea with
    only a half-dozen people thinking about it. As Dawkins points out, the word
    "meme" has entered the English language. Memetics is a major branch of pop
    science. But that's all it is so far.

    Now maybe the problem is that all the mainstream thinkers -- a class which
    surely does not include me, by mainstream standards I'm as wild and crazy as
    any memeticist -- are ignoring memetics and so memetics can't work up a
    critical mass of thinkers. Or maybe the standard memetic paradigm, memes in
    the head, simply isn't workable.

    I mean, if it really isn't workable, that would surely explain why it hasn't
    produced results. And this, given the wide availability of memetic ideas,
    is by far the simplest explanation.

    > even within those with widely established paradigms e.g. in this week's New
    > Scientist there's a piece on whether or not human evolution has essentially
    > stopped, with some big names (e.g. Steve Jones) disagreeing about whether it
    > has or hasn't.
    >
    >> The memetic Emperor is absolutely without clothes. As far as I can
    > tell, it
    >> attracts Big Thinkers with Little Ideas.>
    >>
    > Big thinkers with little ideas... This could be taken as a
    > compliment. After all better than having little thinkers with big ideas
    > (that's how WWII started you know). Sometimes knowledge acquisition is
    > dramatic and profound (Darwin, Einstein), but largely it is gradual and
    > incremental, and for the most part we are all standing on the shoulders of
    > giants.

    None of them being memeticists.

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