Or a physical trait, and yes, that is how they are found- in their
absence these traits do not happen, or if added to or changed, the trait
gets changed.
Such is also my tack on 'discovering' the meme- let's create an instance
where we suspect _it will not be there_ and let us see if some action
does not happen, or gets changed. But to do this, we need a much more
refined meme- we cannot play experimentally with a 'meme' of theism, or
even of wearing Hilfiger logos on cheap clothes- we really do have to
reduce what we are looking at to specific instances of single actions
with minimal consequences. That is my quandary- I'm not seeing any
efforts in that direction, and what I do see is just a new jargon placed
on old studies, or some new maths applied to data gathered for other
purposes. Has anyone gathered any data specifically for a memetic
experiment? Be glad to learn about it....
I am more than ready to think that such a reduced to its terms meme has a
definite, repeatable, identifiable place where it happens in the brain,
in exactly the same way genes are identified and _removed or added_ to
chunks of DNA in the cell.
And we are back to looking for the drosophila, ain't we? At any rate, we
need something which can be mutated in a repeatable, definite way, and a
way to observe and record the effects. I see neither thing yet in all I
know of 'memetics'. And I stand with Wilson that until and if such things
are established, 'memetics' is not a science, and may be no more than a
pseudo-discipline of at best questionable authenticity.
*****************
Wade T. Smith
morbius@channel1.com | "There ain't nothin' you
wade_smith@harvard.edu | shouldn't do to a god."
******* http://www.channel1.com/users/morbius/ *******