virus: RE: Memes and Mind Viruses
Robin Faichney (r.j.faichney@stir.ac.uk)
Mon, 9 Jun 1997 11:36:00 +0100
Richard wrote:
>just as a traditional Darwinist can predict
>that successfully replicating genomes will increase their
>population in the future at the expense of the less fit, the
>memetic Darwinist can predict that religions, MLM's, chain
>letters, and animals (remember the "charismatic megafauna"
>flap) with "good memes" will populate people's minds in the
>future at the expense of the less fit. We should be doing
>experiments right now to test this hypothesis.
BEEP!
That was my tautology detector.
The fit survive to reproduce. And what does "fit" mean?
Something is fit if it survives to reproduce. It's circular.
You can't test whether "good memes" will populate
people's minds in the future at the expense of the less
fit, if "good memes" are defined as those that will
populate people's minds in the future at the expense of
the less fit.
Robin