Subject: RE: What came first?
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1999 01:19:42 -0400
From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu>
To: "Memetics Discussion List" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
Not that it matters, none of these thoughts need answers, silence is
acceptable, but-
>in terms of chickens and eggs, mutations in the eggs
>are potentially passed on to future eggs, and mutations in the chickens are
>potentially passed on to future chickens.
- and we must not count our chickens before they are hatched....
Regardless of what a meme is, or if it is, or where it is, or when it is,
the cultural chicken has to be a mature form of a cultural egg, nascency
is not applicable, and the mutation is in the egg. (Rampant sex and
miscegenation will always be forces in evolution, and more power to 'em-
like the priest says in 'At Play in the Fields of the Lord'- "We'll all
be brown in 200 years. Live with it.")
Aren't there limits to the mutations possible in culture as there are in
successful biologies? Is there an analog to the sustaining life system of
a whole organism? Doesn't a culture need to have a completeness about it
in order to have a sustenance, a future? Are not memes, if memes are
necessary at all, part of this completeness? Would there not be a
critical mass of memes required before any culture could happen? Can we
actually see this mass from inside of it? Is not, perhaps, culture always
a territorial reaction to the general proliferation of a homogenous
genotype within the biological realm? Will we ever all be really brown?
- Wade
===============================================================
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