>> > 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?
>
>The search is always valuable, we just shouldn't be disappointed by
>finding them in an unexpected form. The search for the "gene" led us
>to marvellous new understandings and capabilities. It just never led
>us to anything we could point to and call a gene.
When did genes suddenly lose the quality of being uniquely identifiable?
A gene is at least identifiable as the base-pair sequence that corresponds to
the protein that is transcribed from its corresponding RNA. I'm surely no
geneticist, but this is fairly fundamental, isn't it? It's certainly not a
"mathematical abstraction". Perhaps you're confusing the expression of a
single, identifiable trait with a single, specific gene.
Dan
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The Metasystem Transition History of the "Dan Plante" System:
initial conditions = data (conception)
control of data = information (conception to puberty)
control of information = knowledge (puberty to marriage)
control of knowledge = wisdom (marriage to divorce)
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