On Apr 12, 2013, at 5:55 AM, John F Sowa wrote: (01)
> Ronald, Ali, Doug, Pavithra, and Pat,
>
> In all the discussions and publications about memes, you can do a global
> change of 'meme' to 'idea that has become popular' without changing the
> meaning of anything in the discussion itself. (02)
But what this ignores, and what is the point of the "meme" idea, is that these
popular ideas have a social dynamic in how they spread and how they change and
how they compete with one another which is very similar to how genes disperse
and mutate in biological populations. And this is a potentially useful insight,
particularly as the metaphor seems to work quite extensively, and there is a
good theoretical justification for why it should do so. (03)
BTW, memes need not be ideas, exactly. Eg popular musical phrases can be memes. (04)
>
> What the word 'meme' contributes is a keyword or search term that
> links the documents in which it is used. That is very helpful for
> finding related discussions. But, by itself, it doesn't explain
> the underlying principles. (05)
But Dawkins, who coined the term, does provide an account of those principles,
and others, notably Blakewell, have elaborated then in considerable detail. (06)
>
> My complaint about the word 'meme' is that the analogy with genes is
> more distracting than enlightening. (07)
I disagree. I find it very enlightening. It accounts well for some puzzling
phenomena that were noted earlier, such as the astonishing stability of
children's games and nursery rhymes, noted by the Opies back in the 1970s. The
biological idea of a 'niche' can be applied in memetics to explain this. (08)
> In the popular and academic talk,
> nobody has found any unifying principle that is more precise or cogent
> than the term 'idea that has become popular'. (09)
Have you actually read Dawkins and Blakewell and Dennett on this topic? I find
them extremely persuasive. (010)
Pat (011)
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