🚀 go-pugleaf

Nick Maclaren <nmm1@cus.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> In article <376f0a.ec1.ln@linuxsys.ii01.org>,
> Robin Faichney  <robin@ii01.org> wrote:

[Nick wrote]
>>> 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.

You're probably thinking of the New Edition, in 89, which had more on
memes than did the original.

> 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 :-(

Given the wide gray area between "mainstream" and "heretical", I don't
think this is worth arguing about.

> 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.

Memetics has nothing in common with Lamarckism!  Except that that's a
common misunderstanding of it.  In fact, the biggest single advantage
of memetics is that it explains how phenomena that would appear to
require the inheritance of acquired characteristics -- behavioural
patterns arising in one generation and recurring in subsequent ones --
in fact, don't.

Memetics is certainly a valid model for the cultural as opp. genetic
transmission of behaviour, but I'd be interested to know in what context
you got the impression that it is "generally accepted".

And I know only a couple of people who take seriously the concept of
heritable ideas -- and I don't take *them* seriously!  That is very,
very far from mainstream memetics.

> 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.

I don't know whether you consider that a scientific theory, but I don't,
even though I'm sympathetic to it.  The issue here would seem to be the
inadequacy of common concepts, with the truth lying somewhere between the
extremes of "created" and "discovered".  Personally, I like Frieden's
formulation, that the laws of physics are generated by the attempt to
minimize the difference between an entity or system's own, physical
information, and the information that physicists can obtain about it.
More on this at http://www.ii01.org/physics.html

> 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.

Are genes 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!

Yup.

> 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.

Absolutely.

-- 
Robin Faichney
"One person's mess is another's complexity"
inside information -- http://www.ii01.org/