Keith Hudson wrote:
> At 19:29 29/05/01 -0400, you wrote:
> cut to --->
> > True imitation is extremely rare in animals other than humans, except
> >for birdsong and dolphin
> > vocalisation, suggesting that they can have few or no memes.
>
> I'm not so sure about this. I once kept fantail doves. I'd built a dovecote
> next to my garden pond (a rather elegant dovecote if I might say so). One
> day a young dove, barely able to fly, fluttered down and fell into the
> pond. Although to my mind he was obviously in some distress, two other
> young doves thought this great fun and dived in as well. It was a veritable
> Armada of doves striking out vigorously for the opposite shore. Needless to
> say, they were all in danger of drowning almost immediately and I had to
> assist them out. I told a biologist about this once and he didn't believe me.
>
> Keith H
>
> P.S. Mind you, my garden pond was a cut above the ordinary. I'd stocked it
> up with fish, frogs, newts -- all acquired (surreptiously one dark evening)
> from the lake at Warwick University. The doves' parents, however, had come
> from a rather dubious establishment in Birmingham with no intellectual
> distinction, but maybe during conception the offspring had acquired memes
> by some sort of osmotic process from their aquatic neighbours.
And then, of course, there's Sheldrake's Hypothesis of morphic resonance:
Controversy follows Sheldrake at every turn, and little wonder. The existence of
telepathy, a
radical notion by itself, is just a subset of Sheldrake's larger
premises--that invisible, but
nonetheless pervasive "morphic fields" are responsible for both the
shape and behavior of all
things, from atoms to zebras, organizing them much as a magnetic field
lines up iron filings. Just
as controversial is Sheldrake's hypothesis that these fields broadcast
across time and space, a
phenomenon he calls morphic resonance. Result: A carrot seed grows into
the shape of a carrot
because it is directed by the cumulative morphic resonance of all
previous carrots. A million
blind African termites build a 10-foot-tall nest, featuring
top-to-bottom ventilation shafts and
other complex architectures, because they are guided by the morphic
resonance of previous
termite nests. A newspaper crossword puzzle is easier to solve late in
the day, because the
morphic resonance broadcast by thousands of successful solvers
facilitates the task. A dog
anticipates its owner's return because the bond they forge through
close association is what
Sheldrake terms a "social" morphic field, which stretches, but does not
break, when they are
apart. Sheldrake contends the same transcendental bonding explains how
pigeons home, fish
school, and dogs and cats find owners who have moved hundreds of miles
away. Humans, Sheldrake
says, retain only vestiges of morphic-resonance telepathy, possibly
because telephones and mass
media make the ability less necessary for survival. In animals, he
contends, it remains robust.
--
http://publish.uwo.ca/~mcdaniel/
