From: "Paul Marsden" <paulmarsden@msn.com>
To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: JCS: Of memes and witchcraft
Date: Tue, 25 May 1999 07:29:36 +0200
> "The truth in memetics seems to be the simple fact that we human
> beings are indeed always, to some extent, passive recipients of
> existing ideas - not because those ideas are parasites infesting us
> but because we are social animals, closely bound to those around us by
> familiarity and affection, so that we largely pick up our habits from
> them." [Mary Midgley, "Of memes and withcraft", jcs-online, 5/20/99]
Enough already! This statement says more about the author than about
memetics. Life is not just one damn thing after another, it is one damn
thing *instead of another*: evolutionary culture theory, or to use the
neologism memetics, is not only about heredity (one thing after another),
but also about selection, (and indeed cultural variation). Humans are
anything but passive recipients of information, we use it selectively.
Paul Marsden
Graduate Research Centre in the Social Sciences
University of Sussex
P.Marsden@sussex.ac.uk
PaulMarsden@msn.com
ICQ 35642304
Tel (44) (0) 958 733 414
-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Gross <dave@moorlock.eorbit.net>
To: Anthony_Sebastian@msn.com <Anthony_Sebastian@msn.com>
Cc: memetics@mmu.ac.uk <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>; robin@faichney.demon.co.uk
<robin@faichney.demon.co.uk>
Date: 24 May 1999 21:39
Subject: Re: JCS: Of memes and witchcraft
>
>> "The truth in memetics seems to be the simple fact that we human
>> beings are indeed always, to some extent, passive recipients of
>> existing ideas - not because those ideas are parasites infesting us
>> but because we are social animals, closely bound to those around us by
>> familiarity and affection, so that we largely pick up our habits from
>> them." [Mary Midgley, "Of memes and withcraft", jcs-online, 5/20/99]
>
>This is a pretty awful summary of memetics. It's like saying that the
>theory of evolution via natural selection can be reduced to the
>observation of heredity. Evolution goes beyond this observation and uses
>it as the basis of a theory as to how the variety of life has developed.
>
>Similarly, memetics uses the 'summary' you've quoted above as the basis
>for something much more than "people copy other people." It's a theory
>about why we're surrounded by so many complex languages, religions,
>fashions, movements, myths and such. It hopes to explain the complexity
>and variety and change-over-time of human culture, or, in its humbler
>moments, to explain at least some of that story.
>
>And as evolutionary theory in biology progressed by abandoning the idea
>that the variety of life forms were the result of the whim of a
>creator-god whose motives must be analyzed in order to understand His
>creation, in favor of seeing these creatures as agents in an uncannily
>creative but unconscious generative process - meme theory is using a
>similar perspective in the hopes of gaining more insight into the
>perplexities of the human social arena than folk psychology (or its many
>sophisticated descendants), with its own whimsical creator-ego, seems to
>be able to provide.
>
>-- Dave Gross
> http://www.lycaeum.org/~sputnik/Memetics/
>
>
>
>===============================================================
>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
>
===============================================================
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