[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
I would certainly agree. But are memes, or more generally, the notion of
shared ideas, an exclusively human trait? Have not the very cells in our
bodies "agreed" upon how to communicate? Is the emergence of such
communications, through biology, any different from the emergence of memes
in human communications? Or is that something that differentiates us from
the rest of the universe? I'd answer that last question, "No."
Since I inadvertently deleted Nick's original message let me have my say
about the notions of cooperation and competition in general and the meme/gene
analogy.
Start with the meme/gene. There are several differences. They are transmitted
differently. A gene can only get into another body by having new bodies made
while meme's are not transmitted only via a "germ line" (don't quibble about
the exceptions that prove the rule here). Thus it is easier for a meme to
jump than a gene to jump and a meme's strategies for copying itself are thus
more flexible. The organism carrying a gene must survive to reproduce but
this is not true for a meme. Once a gene is gone it is gone but meme's can
come back (the same idea can be rediscovered but an extinct gene cannot be
reborn).
As to the competition cooperation problem, well this has been a topic under
intense investigation by evolutionary biologists for the past 40 years (it
may be the most intensely investigated topic). I think the best lay
explanation I have read is in Roger Lewin's book "Complexity". Lewin gets
many of his ideas from Leon Kaufman the guru of complexity. Lewin concludes
that genes always behave selfishly but that more often than not this means
that they cooperate rather than compete. In Non-Zero, Robert Wright makes the
analogy between zero sum games (competition) and non-zero sum games
(cooperation). Genes are always selfish. They must be or they will not
survive but selfishness is just a matter of how many copies of yourself you
make. If you can make more copies by cooperating than by competing so be it.
This actually very main stream evolutionary thinking. Dawkins, the author of
The Self Gene goes to great lengths to explain this. Now if you are looking
for altruism without a selfish motive you are bum out of luck when it comes
to a genetic replicator. It just won't work. But cooperation is much more
prevalent than competition. The only pure competition is between different
versions of the same gene. Everything else has at least some element of
cooperation (even a hunter and prey must at some level cooperate if they are
to stay in a stable ecosystem).
I personally think that the whole compete
