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Johannes,
About the whale story,
New scientist wondered what was so attractive about
the new song.
According to Mike Noad, the whales are stimulated by novelty and that it was the very strangeness of the song that made it
attractive.
To keep a long story short, Noad implies a lot with
this. No doubt he knows a lot
about whales and whales songs, I don 't
!
But, from a human perspective a reason for changing
their song could be that the
females in their group were lured away by the males
singing the song.
To keep up the pace, as a reaction to a than changing environment, the other whales had to learn the song very
quickly.
Eventually they did and now every whale is singing the same song. Humans and whales share historical evolutionary
processes, that is, we ' re both
mammals, presumebly we do have than the '
same ' abilities towards learning,
childcare and social behaviour.
Memes would be in principle the same, just put on another branch of the evolutio- nary tree, in the context of mammals that is.
I do think, in order to stay ' being a male whale ' that a male had to ' react ' to the new song, in the context of course, that the
new song was lurking away his
mate.
An analogy, a guy in a Porche is lurking away all the girls. What do we do beside going home and crying our eyes out !? We buy
ourselves a Ferrari !!
That will teach him.
In my book, memes are in that sense independent
that they don 't have any
concern about you and me or any concern about the
result of their actions for
that matter. Memes have an agenda on their own and
in a sense a life on their
own, that is, each idea and each nuance drawn out
of each idea has its own li-
neage, has its own niche wherein its evolutionary
process takes place.
Unless we find a common ground, wherein, lets say
memes can be applied in
the level of Intellect, there will be a discordance
between Moq and Memetics.
I think, like Richard Ridge would argue that
memetics can contribute to the
' reason- aspect ' of our behavior.
IMO, and I do defend this upon the Memetic
discussion list, Memetics must come
out in the open, showing how it works in practice.
Staying in the ivory tower will
lead to its end...
Best regards,
Kenneth
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