RE: virus: meme science

Richard Brodie (RBrodie@brodietech.com)
Tue, 24 Dec 1996 10:16:06 -0800


*Whew!* You go for a little seven-day Caribbean cruise, and all hell
breaks loose! Let's begin...

XYZ wrote:

>I started this whole thread
>by quoting Richard Brodie from his book "Virus of the Mind" where he
>calls
>it "The New Science of the Mind".

Thanks for the plug. The title of my best-selling book, now in its third
printing, is actually Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme.
The Pulitzer-prizewinning cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter was the
first to publish the term "memetics" as the science of memes.

> The thread has since digressed due to
>the misunderstanding of what science is by many people here.

=)

> All I have been
>asking all along is, "if memetics is a science and not a fad, where is
>the
>science?".

I don't think science and fads are mutually exclusive. Something becomes
a fad because it has good memes. A science may or may not be marketed
with good memes. That's Dawkins's new job, by the way: to package
science with good memes.

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
>