From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Tue Jan 29 2002 - 18:27:17 MST
On 29 Jan 2002 at 13:52, L' Ermit wrote:
> [Joe Dees] No, because memes inhabit and compete for space in an intentional
> environment (human brains and the recursive and meaning-creating,
> bestowing-and-apprehending minds which emerge from this complex material
> substrate) rather than in a natural and nonintentional
> environment, such as a terrestrial ecology. People actually intentionally
> deconstruct memeplexes into component memes and recombine them in novel ways
> for preconceived purposes (or just for the helluvit), rather than them just
> mutate at random without so much as a whiff of intentional human agency.
>
> [Hermit] Isn't this one possible expansion of "especially memetic selection"
> (others being genetic and environmental)? What else is implied (to you) by
> "memetic selection"?
>
> [Joe Dees] Your modified quote seemed to imply that memetic mutation was
> random; I do not see either the mutation or the selection as random in its
> entirety, but as a combination of random (say, inadvertent or accidental)
> and intentional (as far as selection goes, for - hooks, among other things -
> and against - filters, among still others)(as far as mutation goes, we are
> here ostensibly engaged in an exercise in intentionally driven - not random
> - memetic engineering, for clear and meaningful purposes). In fact, I see
> the intentional component in both as quite sizeable. This is an area where
> genetic theory and memetic theory significantly diverge.
>
> [Hermit] Shakes his head again.
>
> [quote]
> "The theory of evolution says that life originated, and evolution proceeds,
> by random chance." [Hermit: A quote of a misunderstanding]
>
> There is probably no other statement which is a better indication that the
> arguer doesn't understand evolution. Chance certainly plays a large part in
> evolution, but this argument completely ignores the fundamental role of
> natural selection, and selection is the very opposite of chance. Chance, in
> the form of mutations, provides genetic variation, which is the raw material
> that natural selection has to work with. From there, natural selection sorts
> out certain variations. Those variations which give greater reproductive
> success to their possessors (and chance ensures that such beneficial
> mutations will be inevitable) are retained, and less successful variations
> are weeded out. When the environment changes, or when organisms move to a
> different environment, different variations are selected, leading eventually
> to different species. Harmful mutations usually die out quickly, so they
> don't interfere with the process of beneficial mutations accumulating.
>
> Nor is abiogenesis (the origin of the first life) due purely to chance.
> Atoms and molecules arrange themselves not purely randomly, but according to
> their chemical properties. In the case of carbon atoms especially, this
> means complex molecules are sure to form spontaneously, and these complex
> molecules can influence each other to create even more complex molecules.
> Once a molecule forms that is approximately self-replicating, natural
> selection will guide the formation of ever more efficient replicators. The
> first self-replicating object didn't need to be as complex as a modern cell
> or even a strand of DNA. Some self-replicating molecules are not really all
> that complex (as organic molecules go).
> [/quote][url=http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html]
> "Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution", Mark Isaak[/url]
>
> [Hermit] Selection is not random. I see memetic evolution and genetic
> evolution as exact peers. Note the formal definitions of modern evolution,
> they do not speek to the cause, but only to the effect:
>
> [i][b]Evolution:[/b] changes in the genetic composition of a population with
> the passage of time.[i] ["Understanding Evolution by Erminio", Peter Volpe,
> Brown, April 1985]
>
> [i][b]Microevolution:[/b] the shifting of gene frequencies in a local
> population. [/i][supra]
>
> [i][b]Macroevolution:[/b] major transformations of organisms over geological
> time.[/i][supra]
>
> [i][b]Genetic Variation:[/b] the genetic difference between members of a
> population.[/i]["An Introduction to Genetic Analysis", Anthony J. F.
> Griffiths, Jeffrey H. Miller, David T. Suzuki, Freeman & Co., March 1996]
>
> [Hermit] I see no need to postulate a divergence. To my understanding, the
> only difference between genetic and memetic evolution which stands out is in
> Macroevolution, where the very rapid generation shift possible for memes,
> allows memetic macroevolution to occur faster than in geological time. We
> can see the same effect in living creatures with very rapid generation
> rates, e.g. drosphilia. [viz "Experimentally created incipient species of
> Drosophila." Dobzhansky, T. and O. Pavlovsky, Nature, 1971, 230:289-292].
>
I still insist that the meme-selecting environment (human brains) is
intentional, while the gene-selecting environment (the ecosphere) is
not; this appears to me to be a fundamental and significant difference
between the two.
>
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