Memetic Paradigms

From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Thu Mar 29 2001 - 04:38:25 BST

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    Subject: Memetic Paradigms
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            The gene paradigm fails because genes do not mutate as
    memes do; they are either transmitted, or they aren't, and either
    survive as they are, or die with their unsuccessful host as they are.
    The viral paradigm fails because, even though they mutate (there
    seems to be a different strain of flu every year) viral infections do
    not have to compete with many other differing viral types for their
    niches; it is as if only one form of life makes it, or doesn't, in its
    environing ecosphere. But the idea of an environing memetic
    ecosphere is a valid one. A third paradigm has been largely
    ignored - the species paradigm. Memes, like species, have to find
    niches in a surrounding ecosphere, along with other, different
    memes, and both themselves mutate and alter their environment to
    secure such niches. They are not isolable atoms, like genes,
    because their existence includes their relations; memes
    necessarily relate to other memes, and these relations is part and
    parcel of what constitutes the significances of the memes. It is as
    if memes are interplanetarily traveling species; their mutations
    adapting to and changing each cognitive ecology into which they
    journey, and coming to dynamically equilibrational terms with the
    differing already present species which they find from environment
    to environment, or, if they fail to do so, not being able to populate
    the new environment.

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