Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id RAA06114 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Fri, 26 Jan 2001 17:28:13 GMT Message-ID: <3A71B325.84001DCA@bioinf.man.ac.uk> Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2001 17:25:57 +0000 From: Chris Taylor <Christopher.Taylor@man.ac.uk> Organization: University of Manchester X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en-gb] (WinNT; U) X-Accept-Language: en,pdf To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: MIT research reports rats dream of mazes References: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101745C0F@inchna.stir.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Yeah, I think I'm a bit guilty of steaming into other people's terminology having
stewed on my own too long (I think I'm in the atheist-route group too btw). A gene
doesn't have to be transmitted to be a gene because the definition is
molecular-biological (although I'm stretching a bit because genes only come about in
systems which are generational (because that is pretty much essential to life as we
define it). The way I think about a meme is the same (although I may have lost the
rights to the word) - essentially I see my units (~memes) as coherent chunks of
information which have a meaning in some context. They could be in a mind, on a
billboard, whatever; there is no genotype analogue as such - phenotypes beget
phenotypes (giving a huge error rate and a large selection pressure for stereotypy as
a result). In a mind the information is coded in a different way to on a billboard,
or in speech, but you can trace the ancestry. I'm also an absolutist in that I think
that all mental activity apart from the really base animal stuff is ~memetic. I keep
coming back to ecosystems as my analogy, where every player is an organism; some are
tigers, some are intracellular symbionts (i.e. an organism living within, and
completely dependent on, a host) but all players are organisms.
I'll do my homework so I don't look like such a newbie in future!
Have a nice weekend.
Cheers, Chris.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chris Taylor (chris@bioinf.man.ac.uk)
http://bioinf.man.ac.uk/ »people»chris
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