Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 10:15:41 -0400
From: Dr I Price <PEWLEYFORT@compuserve.com>
Subject: Re: memetic speciation? [was what's in a meme]
To: "INTERNET:memetics@mmu.ac.uk" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Bill
Thanks for the linguistics references.
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>>IP I am just starting
>trying to explore what has or has not been written on linguistic taxonom=
y/
>non taxonomy. I don't see especially after John Wilkins observations on
>plant species that linguistic cross pollination lower down the hierarchy=
>renders a taxonomic approach invalid.
>
BB What the tree says is that a given linguistic species has one parent
species -- that's how trees are constructed. But, many linguistic specie=
s
clearly have contributions by many parent species. Of course, not all of=
these contributions are equally important (and just how would one estimat=
e
the importance of a contribution, from a distribution of sources). My
point, at a minimum, is that the tree simply doesn't represent the geneti=
c
relationships which in fact exist between languages.>
a. what sense of genentic do you mean. I assume the general rather than
specifically gene based.
b. I was not suggesting a tree. Sure linguistic species cross pollenate a=
s
they evolve. =
>Now consider culture in general. During the late middle ages a book on
mathematics made its way from the Islamic world to Europe. SNIP. But, i=
n
the context of all the memes afloat in medieveal Europe, that's just one
meme-complex among many.
If we do large-scale memetics like comparative linguists to linguistics,
then the geneological relationship between modern scientific cultures and=
the New East may well be obscured. That's the kind of problem I'm
concerned about.<
Agreed me too. There is an awful lot of co-evolution in these systems, bu=
t
then as Dawkins said even 'the selfish gene is a metaphor for a system of=
interacting genes of almost infinit complexity' [something like that. I
haven't time to look up the exact words.
If Price
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