>Because always having to think about which ideas you should propagate
>and
>discuss in order to benefit your social organisation puts an instant
>and
>heavyweight selection pressure on the memes which will flourish in that
>organisation's group memetic processing resource, meaning that the
>opportunities for novel DESCRIPTIVE ideas are curtailed for the purpose
>of
>promoting a lower bandwidth set of PRESCRIPTIVE ideas.
That would be true if there were some finite number of possible memes.
But throughout history religious pressures have SPURRED art, music, and
so on, not curtailed it.
>
>>>If religions didn't have some element of benefit to the human race, why
>>>would they persist as memes for so long?
>>
>>Because viruses of the mind exist for their own benefit.
>
>Sorry, but no... Dennett and Dawkins and Speel all agree that one of
>the
>major selection pressures on memes is whether or not they confer a
>genetic
>benefit on their host organism.
Whoa bucko! Brodie definitely does NOT agree, and thinks that this
egocentric view of memes will be SMASHED when further research is done.
This "major pressure" is a faint echo of a time when the ancestral memes
conferred an ancestral genetic advantage on their host. Meme evolution
happens so much faster than gene evolution that these pressures no
longer have much bearing on genetics. I make this point many times in
VIRUS OF THE MIND.
Rememeber, you heard it here first.
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
>