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Boyd, G. (2001). The Human Agency Of Meme Machines: A review of the Meme
Machine.
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, 5.
http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/2001/vol4/boyd_g.html
The Human Agency Of Meme Machines
An extended review of:
Blackmore, Susan (1999) The Meme Machine.
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. 264 pp. ISBN 0 19 850 365 2
Gary Boyd
Concordia University
Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
boydg@vax2.concordia.ca
1 Importance
For any thoughtful reader, Susan Blackmore's Meme Machine is an important book
because it clearly explains and illustrates the basic import of the new field
of memetics. Actually memetics did not just spring from the head of Zeus
(Dawkins) fully formed, but like Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby's (1998)
evolutionary psychology, rather it is part of a general contemporary movement
to extend evolutionary explanation beyond the purely biological world. At
best,
memetic evolutionary explanation will become nearly as central to the social
sciences as Darwinian evolution has been to the biological sciences. At worst,
memetics might conceivably become another way to deny the uniqueness of each
mysterious human being. Or as Jacoby (1975) would caution, memetics qua
ideology like the computer-metaphor for mind, could become yet another example
of "social amnesia"- of reification leading to further alienation. Having
acknowledged that possibility I must go on to state that current work makes me
rather confident that memetics insights will actually help us find many new
solutions to educational and political problems.
"How is memetic evolution steerable?" that is the key question and the one
which Blackmore's Meme Machine poses and partly answers with good heuristics
which should lead to real progress.
Full text:
http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/2001/vol5/boyd_g.html
Stay hungry,
--J. R.
Useless hypotheses:
consciousness, phlogiston, philosophy, vitalism, mind, free will, qualia,
analog computing, cultural relativism
Everything that can happen has already happened, not just once,
but an infinite number of times, and will continue to do so forever.
(Everything that can happen = more than anyone can imagine.)
http://www.shasta.com/jr
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/virtropy
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