Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id LAA04607 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 9 Jan 2002 11:45:42 GMT Message-ID: <3C3C2C77.5010709@bioinf.man.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2002 11:41:43 +0000 From: Chris Taylor <Christopher.Taylor@man.ac.uk> Organization: University of Manchester User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-GB; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20011019 Netscape6/6.2 X-Accept-Language: en-gb To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Lamarckian? References: <AA-0E749BBF44B1874CFFF8651350E0A843-ZZ@maillink1.prodigy.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> By the way, congrats Chris with your son... Cheers!
Ta :)
I'd like to address this often tacit assumption that meme evolution is
kind of Lamarckian. I remember Dennett analogising about crabgrass and
bluegrass competing for dominion in his yard, to represent competing
ideas in his mind; the important bit here is the idea that there are
many copies (ok grass grows clonally a lot but try to ignore that :\ )
of each 'organism' rather than two competing entities.
This is why meme evolution is really Darwinian, without the need for
acquired characteristics - there are many copies of a meme, probably
successive 'generations' fly by in our heads without any awareness, but
because every time we 'look' we see a meme, very similar to the last
one, we call it the same and assume it has acquired any changes rather
than them having occurred between successive rapid generations.
I reckon...
Plus, this appeals because we could construct a Darwinian 'learning'
machine (effectively a sort of neural genetic algorithm) much more
simply than a Lamarckian version (which must have a facility to learn
for a start). Maybe if AI used GAs we'd be A-OK.
And if the AA used GIs...
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Chris Taylor (chris@bioinf.man.ac.uk)
http://bioinf.man.ac.uk/ »people»chris
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