Date: Sun, 13 Jul 1997 15:39:35 -0700
From: Arel Lucas <arel@pacbell.net>
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: Re: Genetics/Memetics analogy
Dr I Price wrote:
>
> The ongoing Bill Benzon If Price dialogue
>
> -------------------------------------------------
Your ongoing dialogue is valuable to memetics. My brother-in-law sent me
another list of one-liners yesterday, and I think one is quite applicable
to this discussion: "I don't have a solution, but I admire the problem."
I really do admire the problems in this discussion: how to define memes,
and how to explain the mechanisms of the behavior or memes.
Each of us has solutions or partial ones, but it seems no one is quite
ready to accept anyone else's yet, which means memetics definitely is
alive and kicking and still being argued about! Good!
Can we agree on what elements a good definition should have? (The shape
of the table--isn't that what diplomats spend years working out first?)
A possible partial list to kick around:
effect on behavior
replicability
relationship to/mechanism of Darwinian process
relationship to brain
physical form
mechanism of brain relationship
encoding/encodability
compatibility with brain/mind modeling (which model are we using?
Calvin's? whose?)
Arel Lucas
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