From: Walter Watts (wlwatts@home.com)
Date: Tue Jan 29 2002 - 01:05:18 MST
L' Ermit wrote:
<snip>
> [Hermit] What you (i.e. Joe) appear to be doing currently, is to propose
> that the meme defines the environment. I suspect that you are granting a
> meme more power than any has demonstrated to date and which breaks the
> genetic origin of the analogy. Reaching back to the Darwinistic evolutionary
> pattern, a meme does not define its environment, but rather, is defined by
> it. When the meme is harmful to its carriers, it will adapt or die out for
> want of carriers. The environment determines the alleles - not vice versa.
We could, I suspect, take this neo-Darwinism one step further and propose that a
meme not only does not DEFINE its environment, but NEITHER is the meme itself
DEFINED by its environment.
The meme is simply BEING (a meme). Blindly, dumbth to the nth degree,
fuckwitingly trivial and horny as a teenage thug with his first hardcore porn in
hand.
Ready, willing and able to spew vast amounts of milky-white memetic tadpoles
into culture's cunt.
And just like your average teenage male, it's mostly a load 'o lies!
The trick, for the lucky tadpole roaming the fitness landscape, is waiting and
watching to see which LYING tadpole the culture exapts a use for, and more
importantly a subsequent advantage based on this new use.
The meme is derived as the main unit of cultural idea transmission from its
similarities to its organic counterpart, the gene, isn't it?
And evolution being the procedural language for said gene, then
let’s look again, for a moment, at what our knowledge of the evolutionary
process suggests may have occurred. First, it’s important to remember that new
structures do not arise for anything. They simply come about spontaneously, as
byproducts of copying errors that routinely occur as genetic information is
passed from one generation to the next. Natural selection is most certainly not
a generative force that calls new structures into existence; it can only work on
variations that are presented to it, whether to eliminate unfavorable variants
or to promote successful ones. We like to speak in terms of adaptations, since
this helps us to make up stories about how and why particular innovations have
arisen, or have been successful, in the course of evolution; but in reality, all
new genetic variants must come into being as exaptations. The difference is that
while adaptations are features that fulfill specific, identifiable functions
(which they cannot do, of course, until they are in place), exaptations are
simply features that have arisen and are potentially available to be coopted
into some new function. This is routine stuff, for many new structures stay
around for no better reason than that they just don’t get in the way.
Walter
-- Walter Watts Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc. "To err is human. To really screw things up requires a bare-naked command line and a wildcard operator."
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