Re: virus: Re: Rationality (meme make-up)

Tim Rhodes (proftim@speakeasy.org)
Mon, 17 Mar 1997 08:53:55 -0800 (PST)


On Fri, 14 Mar 1997, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:

> The fact that neither genes nor memes are neatly organized into units
> with nice orderly consequences is just a fact of life. But we can
> see the statistical effect, and on the average they behave pretty much
> like Mendel's genes, even though we now know that they don't exist as
> Mendel imagined them (even if he hadn't faked his numbers).
>
> Regardless of the fuzzyness of both concepts, their effects are
> quite obviously real; blue-eyed parents do in fact wind up with blue-
> eyed children, and French children wind up with French accents. If
> a mathematical abstraction like "gene" or "meme" helps explain those
> phenomena, why should we quibble that they don't neatly organize
> themselves they way we would like? That just underlines the fact that
> they weren't designed, but emerged as a result of a complex system.

So does it really do us any good to look for a neural pattern that
coresponds to a meme or is this just pissing in the wind?

-Prof. Tim