On 05-Aug-06, at 3:22 PM, Vinayak Hegde wrote:
By reading the right books, I suppose you are talking about the
book "The Selfish Meme" by Kate Distin ;-).
As far as I can make out from some quick browsing around, "memetics" is
a set of far-too-literal-minded attempts to map ideas from genetics
to culture
and ideas, which seem to ignore human reasoning abilities completely.
But as ideas are far more fluid and flexible than genes, are
processed by
human beings through a process of reasoning, and interact with survival
dynamics on a whole different level, I very much doubt that this
approach
has any merit (besides making for a few pop-psy books).
When I said "memetic evolution" in an earlier post, I didn't intend
to refer to
any theory of memetics (I didn't know there actually were such theories
around). Cultural or intellectual evolution is probably the phrase I
should
use, to avoid confusion with simple-minded theories of "memetics".
#!
