I hope noone will disagree when I say that a major
difference between children and adults is that
children have yet to acquire many, many memes,
that adults take forgranted.
Now, I have a slight but ongoing problem driving
hereabouts, due to the number of pheasants that
somehow seem attracted onto the winding, single-
track country roads. They have neither the genes
nor the brains to behave safely around vehicular
traffic. Nor, of course, the memes. Traffic is
not something that they evolved alongside, and
so they're not much use around it -- in fact,
they are extremely unsafe.
Now (again), human children certainly do have the
brains to deal with traffic, even though they're
like pheasants in *not* having the (specific)
genes. But where do memes come into it? I say,
in this sort of case, as a substitute for
experience. We could just let kids use their
brains, without any memetic input, and learn
through sheer experience how to behave around
traffic. But as a species who're not just
intelligent, but also highly social, we have
evolved safer ways of handling such situations,
and we tell kids what to do, instead of letting
them find out for themselves. Not only that,
but we tell them at an earlier age than that at
which they're capable of comprehending things
like inertia and relative velocities, simply
because we're realistic about the ages at
which they become so capable, and at which
they're likely to be around traffic, recogising
that the latter is likely to be somewhat less
than the former.
No?
-- Robin Faichney http://www.faichney.org/robin/