From: "Paul Marsden" <paulmarsden@msn.com>
To: "memetics" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Not a comprehensive theory
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1999 17:54:55 +0200
>Does it then become a meme, at first transmission? Then what was it before?
>Perhaps a meme should be defined by transmissibility, not prior
>transmission.
Well you could do that but it broadens the realm of memetics out of all
things cultural into the domain of, well, all intrapsychic phenomena, and
critically you lose the social (natural) selective mechanism that I would
argue is the element of memetics that has the most significant and novel
explanatory power within a theoretically informed empirical memetic research
paradigm (i.e. it can explain non-rational behaviour) - see my papers in
JASSS, JoM and SRonline.
Paul Marsden
Graduate Research Centre in the Social Sciences
University of Sussex
P.Marsden@sussex.ac.uk
Paul.Marsden@newscientist.net
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/hbpe2/darwinia.htm
ICQ 35642304
Tel (44) (0) 958 733 414
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