virus: MAIDS (sidetrack)
Kirt A. Dankmyer -- aka Loki (dankmyka@wfu.edu)
Wed, 24 Sep 1997 09:25:21 -0400
>culture). The "dance" phenomenon as in "the social equivalent of thinking"
>has equivalents throughout the material realm as it regards the passing on
>of traits: It is the mating dance, it is the spawning of salmon who go
>against the flow, it is the swimming of sperm to the egg in a test of
>fitness, it is the *genetic* determinant of survival of the fittest (must
>surely be how the gene functions, "chance recombination"). By my
>calculations though, the game is zero sum and leaves one with "chance" as
>the final word. So, it provides raw material, fuel for the fire, of memetic
>processes--which is more like the continuence of a prime cause through its
>own evolutionary stages (or more properly, through *developmental* stages,
>evolution being reserved for "growth" in the sense of taking in several
>possibilities...memetic replication becomes, similarly, "development" in the
>sense of forward momentum).
This assumes that it is the ideas, and not the personalities that are
competing. It's one thing argue against someone's idea, it's another to try
to tweak the *person*. That's another Darwinian process, on a slightly
different level, and perhaps has *some* relations to memetics, in the sense
that the personality that wins out gets to promote his personal meme-set.
On a more extreme level, the whole "cult of personality" concept has a
relation to this -- once the guru has convinced you he's wise, it doesn't
matter if he then tells you're we're all aliens baninshed to this galaxy by
the Dread Lord Xenu, most people are more receptive to the memes no matter
how strange.
-Loki
--
Kirt A. Dankmyer <dankmyka@wfu.edu> --- Academic Computing Specialist
http://www.wfu.edu/~dankmyka/ -- (910) 759-4202 -- PGP public key available.
For the Snark _was_ a Boojum, you see. --Lewis Carroll