From: "Paul Marsden" <PaulMarsden@email.msn.com>
To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: On Gatherer's behaviourist stance
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1998 19:23:47 +0100
A plea for tolerance and diversity.
Aaron Lynch wrote.
>Dawkins has very explicitly explained that the word he coined refers to
>brain-stored information. See, for instance, p. 329 of the 1989 revised
>edition of _The Selfish Gene_, or the meme section of _The Extended
>Phenotype_ (Dawkins, 1982). Yet we have people who want to use mere
>"trendiness" of the term as a basis for calling artifacts and behaviors
>"memes."
Who are we referring to here, those trendy folk at the Oxford English
Dictionary who define a meme as "a unit of imitation," ?
Or perhaps Dawkins himself, who, half a decade after the selective quotes
you have provided said
"McDonald: Let's talk about listening to music and going to Shakespeare
plays. Now, you coined a word to describe all these various activities which
are not genetically driven, and that word is 'meme' and again this is a
replicating process.
Dawkins: Yes, there are cultural entities which replicate in something like
the same way as DNA does. The spread of the habit of wearing a baseball hat
backwards is something that has spread around the Western world like an
epidemic. It's like a smallpox epidemic. You could actually do epidemiology
on the reverse baseball hat. It rises to a peak, plateaus and I sincerely
hope it will die down soon."
Channel 4 in the UK Richard Dawkins interview on 15 Aug. 1994.
This I believe is behaviour. But then Dawkins always has been a trendy kind
of guy.
There is absolutely no point in getting into a game of selective quotation,
I could provide you with numerous quotes from Professors Dennett and Plotkin
who are "calling artefacts and behaviours memes", as well as Dr. Blackmore
and virtually all other academic researchers involved in memetics. Maybe we
just *are* trendy and you are mistaking correlation for causation..
>We may also have people willing to sacrifice specificity in order
>to have the term "memetics" explicitly lay claim to as much territory as
>possible.
Who are we talking about now? I certainly don't want to lay claim to as much
territory as possible, although as a selectionist I must eschew
essentialism - and in consequence I must also eschew restrictive
essentialist definitions, especially in the infancy of our emerging
paradigm. Arbitrary reduction of variation in a gene/meme pool usually ends
in tears.
>Neither of these motives constitute scientifically valid reasons
>for changing the word's meaning,
Who's changing it? I'm just being an orthodox pixie following obediently in
the shadows of OED, Dennett, Dawkins, Blackmore, etc etc. I suggest it is
you who is attempting to change it, by trying to impose a restrictive
definition - where memetics are reduced to "how belief spreads through
society" on what is a flexible, useful and powerful tool in understanding
human activity form within the selectionist paradigm.
>but only constitute possible reasons for
>adding a few new words for other kinds of replicators. If there is no such
>thing as replicated information residing in the brain, then good science
>dictates DROPPING THE WORD MEME from the accepted science vocabulary.
According to who? I like to think of myself as a humble scientist - and I
have absolutely no intention of doing this
>Those arguing against brain-stored
>replicated information should refrain from trying to appropriate the word
>"meme" for other uses, and argue instead for relegating the term to the
>scrap heap of scientific terms that turned out not to fit real phenomena.
Thank you for telling me what I *should* be doing, I was in such a muddle.
I thought I was making a plea for tolerance and diversity in memetics. At
this early stage in the formation of memetics as a discipline, I think we
should be tolerant of the many approaches and terminologies that we all
bring from our respective disciplines.
Paul Marsden
Graduate Research Centre in the Social Sciences
University of Sussex
e-mail PaulMarsden@msn.com
tel/fax (44) (0) 117 974 1279
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission:
http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/
-----Original Message-----
From: Aaron Lynch <aaron@mcs.net>
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Date: 13 September 1998 18:38
Subject: Re: On Gatherer's behaviourist stance
>At 12:01 PM 9/11/98 -0600, Lloyd Robertson wrote:
>
>>So is it a matter of crossed semantics? Some people choose to define memes
>>so tht thoughts are made up of them, others so that they exist outside of
>>one's head. It's like comparing apples and oranges when the only name we
>>have for either is "pear".
>>
>>Lloyd
>
>That's a nice, succinct way of expressing our terminological problem,
Lloyd.
>
>Dawkins has very explicitly explained that the word he coined refers to
>brain-stored information. See, for instance, p. 329 of the 1989 revised
>edition of _The Selfish Gene_, or the meme section of _The Extended
>Phenotype_ (Dawkins, 1982). Yet we have people who want to use mere
>"trendiness" of the term as a basis for calling artifacts and behaviors
>"memes." We may also have people willing to sacrifice specificity in order
>to have the term "memetics" explicitly lay claim to as much territory as
>possible. Neither of these motives constitute scientifically valid reasons
>for changing the word's meaning, but only constitute possible reasons for
>adding a few new words for other kinds of replicators. If there is no such
>thing as replicated information residing in the brain, then good science
>dictates DROPPING THE WORD MEME from the accepted science vocabulary.
>Physicists have mostly abandoned the word "tachyon" due to lack of evidence
>for faster than light particles. Those arguing against brain-stored
>replicated information should refrain from trying to appropriate the word
>"meme" for other uses, and argue instead for relegating the term to the
>scrap heap of scientific terms that turned out not to fit real phenomena.
>
>
>--Aaron Lynch
>
>http://www.mcs.net/~aaron/thoughtcontagion.html
>
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This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit