From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Tue Jan 29 2002 - 01:41:40 MST
On 29 Jan 2002 at 2:05, Walter Watts wrote:
> 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.
>
And all we have to do is to look around at ourr artifacts and the
influence our global civilization has had upon planetary ecology to
realize that memes may indeed indirectly affect environment. I think
that we will find ourself increasingly in a world where memes, genes
and the environment co-evolve and mutually feed into and affect each
other.
>
> 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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