This is a good observation Nate, but I'm not sure that speciation never
occurs in meme-space. I think it happens all the time between the highly
religious and the rest of the world. When the fundamentalist becomes
thoroughly innoculated against "worldly" memes, and thoroughly absorbed
with memes that depend on the <Holy Bible Is Inerrant> meme, there can be
very little memetic replication between the two groups. Here are two
examples:
I was conversing with a Baptist missionary who was preparing to go to the
mission field in Africa. Not thinking, I said to her "Do you realize that
you're going to the continent where the human species first appeared?" Of
course, I was met with a blank stare. I then said "Oh, never mind. I
forgot that you don't accept evolution.", then we started talking about the
weather or some other superficial subject.
I've been to many social gatherings with a roughly equal distribution of
fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists. On many occasions, the
fundamentalists retired to a separate room to discuss and debate obscure
fine-points about the Christian faith. In the other room, the rest of us
were discussing other things. There was plenty of memetic replication
occurring within the two groups, but *none* between the groups.
This second example seems like an almost perfect description of speciation,
but it may be imperfect, because superficial memes like <The Cubs Stink
This Year> can still replicate between the groups.
Continuing on the speciation analogy, I wonder if there is a danger of
memetic inbreeding? Are the Amish the end result of memetic inbreeding?
Comments?