🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <376f0a.ec1.ln@linuxsys.ii01.org>,
Robin Faichney  <robin@ii01.org> wrote:
>Nick Maclaren <nmm1@cus.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>> In article <j0bc0a.b01.ln@linuxsys.ii01.org>,
>> Robin Faichney  <robin@ii01.org> wrote:
>>>Swarat Chaudhuri <swarat_c@lycos.com> wrote:
>>>> Okay, actually I went to your webpage. Looks impressive. And though I
>>>> don't have a _very_ high opinion of Dawkins (he isn't quite
>>>> mathematical and appears to be more of a cult figure than a
>>>> scientist), I respect him sufficiently to consider his praise
>>>> valuable. And since this Christmas break is already getting
>>>> pathetically boring, I'll read Dennett up. :)
>>>
>>>He's a great writer as well as a great thinker.  You won't regret it.
>
>> Which, in my view, Dawkins isn't.  While my opinion is similar about
>> Dawkins, he IS a real scientist - unfortunately, his taste for self
>> publicity makes him appear less of one than he really is.  The
>> introduction to The Selfish Gene contains several quotes designed
>> to cause controversy in cases where what he says in the book is much
>> less contentious.
>
>What about the title?  That's caused enormous amounts of misunderstanding.
>And his anti-religious crusading is highly unscientific.

Quite.

>> The extreme example (which is very relevant to this group) is the
>> way that he has dressed up the meme weebling to sound radical and
>> even heretical.  Well, it was once - 25+ years back - but I can't
>> say if he held the viewpoint then.  It is now mainstream, in principle
>> if not in detail.
>
>Can't agree with you there.  Firstly, 25+ years back from when?
>TSG was first published in 1976.  Secondly, memetics remains far from
>the mainstream, even (perhaps especially) in principle.  I find it
>fascinating, and I've been following it quite closely, attending a meeting
>in your neck of the woods (Kings) in 99 with both Dawkins and Dennett.
>Sue Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine, was there too, and reaction
>to that indicated how far from the mainstream memetics remains.  If you
>doubt it, look for reviews in the New Scientist archives and such places.
>Gould, in particular, is very anti, though I'm not sure if he wrote
>anything specifically in response to TMM.  (Dawkins, by the way, has
>said that he wishes he'd called TSG, The Gene Machine.)

Oh, was it?  I thought that it was late 1980s.  In which case, it
was still fairly radical then, but definitely no longer heretical.
I stand corrected.

The fact that there is a lot of shouting merely proves that it IS
mainstream.  Seriously.  When something is heretical, nobody dares
publish it or, at most, publishes it as science fiction under a
pseudonym.  Virtually no scientist will speak up for it in public.
Things have not changed in millennia :-(

I agree that the weebling in that chapter (and it IS weebling) is
not generally accepted, but back in the 1950s and 1960s even
Lamarckism was not really accepted.  It is now generally accepted
as being a valid model (and perhaps the correct one) for the huge
amount of mammalian behaviour that is taught rather than innate.
And the step from that to considering ideas as inheritable is not
large.

Similarly, the mutability of DNA was close to heretical for many
years though now, of course, everyone claims that they believed it
all along :-)

An example of a theory that is still heretical is the one about
the laws of physics being created rather than discovered.  This
reached science fiction a decade or so back, but is still not
referrable to in serious publications.  Yet a fair number of people
has suspected there may be something to it since the 1960s.

Harking back to "memetics" - the invention of the term merely
indicates that there is a new religion - I would not go so far as
to claim that many people regard ideas as a form of life.  But the
Darwin/Wallace evolutionary model is generally accepted as being
as realistic a model as anything to many classes of idea.  Such as
the approaches used in complex technology!

There are lots of good examples, but the concepts used in programming
languages match particularly well to genes :-)  If you think of them
that way, it becomes a lot easier to see why certain successful
techniques have died out and unsuccessful ones thrived.  Things like
being associated with a line of inheritance that died out for other
reasons, and or being not easily migratable to the successful line
by a simple 'concept exchange'.  Seriously.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren,
University of Cambridge Computing Service,
New Museums Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge CB2 3QH, England.
Email:  nmm1@cam.ac.uk
Tel.:  +44 1223 334761    Fax:  +44 1223 334679