[RB]
>>If you think about it, you may come to see that it is more like
>>"simplistic ideas" or "intuitively pleasing" ideas than "rational" or
>>"real" memes that are better at propagating.
[Dave Pape]
>And if you step back and look at the big picture first, you may
>subsequently
>find yourself asking "Why did these intuitively pleasing ideas come to
>be
>better at propagating?"
A fascinating field of inquiry. It is the intersection of memetics with
evolutionary psychology. I have several chapters on this in Virus of the
Mind (available from the Amazon.com Memetics Bookstore,
http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie/books.htm). The short answer is that
ideas that are intuitively pleasing take advantage of the way our brains
adapted in prehistoric times to memes that supported replication of
their hosts's DNA. Unfortunately, in modern society this results in many
pathological behaviors and tendencies such as overvaluing longshots,
being overafraid of perceived dangers, and preferring simplistic
explanations such as astrology to complicated but more accurate or
useful ones.
Richard Brodie RBrodie@brodietech.com +1.206.688.8600
CEO, Brodie Technology Group, Inc., Bellevue, WA, USA
http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie
Do you know what a "meme" is?
http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie/meme.htm
>