Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id UAA06517 (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 20:32:28 GMT Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2001 19:40:13 +0000 To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Re: MIT research reports rats dream of mazes Message-ID: <20010126194013.A501@reborntechnology.co.uk> References: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101745C0F@inchna.stir.ac.uk> <3A71B325.84001DCA@bioinf.man.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.12i In-Reply-To: <3A71B325.84001DCA@bioinf.man.ac.uk>; from Christopher.Taylor@man.ac.uk on Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 05:25:57PM +0000 From: Robin Faichney <robin@reborntechnology.co.uk> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On Fri, Jan 26, 2001 at 05:25:57PM +0000, Chris Taylor wrote:
> 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
> 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.
If what you're interested in is the "whole ecosystem", then it makes no
sense either to exclude the "really base animal stuff", or to say it's
all about memes.
And it would help if you kept your lines to a reasonable length.
-- Robin Faichney robin@reborntechnology.co.uk=============================================================== 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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