From: Dan Fabulich (daniel.fabulich@yale.edu)
Date: Tue Nov 02 1999 - 16:37:02 MST
'What is your name?' 'Anders Sandberg.' 'IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOUR
NAME IS!!!':
> To continue the series: what would it be to have *three* kinds of
> replicators?
>
> Genes, memes and... ?
Note that memes don't RUN on genes, they run on the machinery which genes
"know" how to build, our brains. So extending the metaphor leads one to
the obvious conclusion that the next thing will not run on our brains, but
on the machinery which our brains figure out how to build: thus, SIdeas
will become the next level. (SInes?)
A good point raised in Kevin Kelley's _Out of Control_, however, is that
memes don't obey the same sort of rules that genes do; if anything, they
evolve in a much more Lamarckian way than genes, since individuals can
make intentional changes to their memes rather than random changes which
simply turn out to have beneficial changes. (Or, on another similar
picture, memes are gene-like, varying randomly, but most variations
usually die in our individual heads before they are copied to other
people.) On account of this, I find the predictive power of memes to be
pretty poor.
-Dan
-unless you love someone-
-nothing else makes any sense-
e.e. cummings
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