Re: virus: The "science" of memes?

Alexander Williams (thantos@alf.dec.com)
Thu, 12 Dec 1996 23:05:48 -0500


XYZ Customer Support wrote:
> Evolution is not about replicators and since the evidence shows that
> individuals do not evolve, then individuals cannot be vehicles for
> imaginary selfish genes. Replicating is not evolving.

One obvious point to make which may bring forth an obvious fallacy:

Here, you're just willfully wrong.

There's an ALife program called Tierra, written by Tom Ray, which starts
with an innoculation of a single organism which does nothing but
replicate/reproduce itself. Its just that sometimes mutations make
changes.

In every run, one sees major evolution of the replication technique.
Individuals, its true, don't evolve, but in the case of memetics humans
aren't the individuals, they're the Tierran "soup," if you will, the
environment in which memetic `individuals,' like individual genes,
reproduce, mutate and die as well as are born. In an /environment/, the
contents may in fact evolve and that damn quickly.

-- 
Alexander Williams {zander@photobooks.com   ||Member: Evil Geniuses
                    thantos@alf.dec.com}    ||For a Better Tomorrow
============================================// => Charter Member <=

"Perhaps we should lower our mental trousers and compare the size of our consciousnesses?" -- Jan Sands to Marvin Minsky comp.ai.genetic ==================================================================== <http://www.photobooks.com/~zander/>