Re: virus:

Martin Glover (martin.glover@dial.pipex.com)
Sat, 24 Oct 1998 16:32:15 +0000


>From: sodom <Sodom@ma.ultranet.com>
>> whats makes a person irrational? if i believe in god am i irrational?
>
>[clip] To have faith in
>something with no evidence to support your position and a great deal of
>evidence against your position, then you are not rational about said
>subject.

Is there much empirical evidence in support of the existence of memes?

I feel that ideas do self-replicate and are subject to evolutionary forces
and that much of human conscious experience is driven by something akin to
what we're calling "memes", but... I think I accept that view on the
strength of other peoples' arguments rather than on the basis of evidence.

If there's not much empirical eveidence to support memetic theories- and
it'd be difficult to dig any up if evidence would rely on how prevalent an
idea was in the population or in a single mind- then maybe one of the
prerequisites for membership of this list is that you /aren't/ rational. By
this definition of rational. And assuming that everyone doesn't just jump up
with masses of evidence in response to this post.

MG