From: <RPrestonic@aol.com>
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 1999 01:33:16 EDT
Subject: Re: facets of meme-talk
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
robin@faichney.demon.co.uk writes:
> It's fine that biologists have DNA to focus upon. But there is no
> reason to believe that there's any equivalent for memetics. Why should
> the storage of memes in the brain differ in any way from the storage of
> any other information there?
Perhaps you could help me with this: why need any details of information
storage
mechanisms have any bearing on the question of the existence of a DNA-analog
for
memes? One reason to think that there is an equivalent to DNA in memetics is
that
memes are alive, and the only other living thing we know about DOES have a
DNA-
equivalent, namely, DNA. There is no reason to believe memetics would be
different.
It's Occam's razor, basically.
> Let's face it, memes have many more degrees of freedom than genes. I
> expect great strides will be made in "neuropsychobiology", but I'll be
> immensely surprised if it has any direct application to memetics.
I'm less interested in the degrees of freedom of imaginary memes (which seem
to
be nearly infinite) than in the degrees of freedom of real memes. The latter
have
yet to be proven to exist, so I would submit that their number of degrees of
freedom
could be less than those of genes, when the dust dies down at the end of the
day.
RP
Pgh PA
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