I start to remember the book I read years ago. Imitation of behaviour is so common, think of fashion, populair culture and politics. Like with genes there is a possibility a mneme changes over time. American ideas about democracy are different than those of the Athenians in the time of Pericles...

Not so different since they used the treaures of the Delos League to pay for the rebuilding of the Acropolis. This left Athens without allies in the Spartan war and defeat followed and the democratic experiment failed after one generation.

That book wouldn't have been Picture This, by Joseph Heller? In any case, Picture This is a great book that often compares Athens to America.

Thanx to the title of the book. I'll start with Face of a Hero, Le petit Prince and something from his friend Vonnegut.

:bigsmile:

Picture This is a 1988 novel from Joseph Heller, the satiric author of the acclaimed Catch-22.
The novel is an eclectic historical journey across three periods of history, all connected by a single painting: Rembrandt van Rijn's Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer. With constant reflections between the different time levels, we jump back and forth between the time of Aristotle, Rembrandt and Heller: the Golden Age of Athens, the brief 17th century golden age of Holland, and the golden age of the USA.

It may well be, that in human societies and cultures, that our social memes have more significance and importance in our idividual survival and procreation than our underlying genetics and that changes in genetic frequency are secondary not primary. It may not be just selfish genes that come to dominate but those inadvertenly carried by the members of the dominate culture. Increased gene freqency does not necessarily mean better genes or superior genes just genes lucky enough to be carried by members of the surviving culture. ie. the culture with the best cultural memes. Cultural and social memes may be the more dominant influence in human evolution.

Agreed.

Although in many ways they are anti-philosophy, since they are basically ideas we accept without examining them. I think a lot can be gained from identifying memes and cross-examining them.

I'm thinking of memes like "tattoo on lower back = she's a tramp".

I guess I think of memes having a unit equal to a sentece, instead of words.

So in that sense it may be anti-philosophy, because it examines the sentence as a whole, but one could still dissect the sentence into its parts. Maybe this addition of scale allows for a further branching of the unit "word" into the unit "sentence" to further research and understanding of society?

I guess I think of memes having a unit equal to a sentece, instead of words.

As for Susan B. I have her book on memes but I haven't read it. I started reading it but didn't finish. Don't recall why.

Perhaps one problem w/ memes is that they are represented with discourse, which is perfectly digital, as hard science tends to be. How do we exactly frame a meme? (de-fine)

Memes would be soft science? (Not that soft science is bad...)

Hardly. I wonder which meme would account for Past Life Memories, and what its medium might be? (I would love to ask Dawkins that....)

Evolution would also seem to be a soft-science, but I think we can still find useful information about which memes survive.

Agreed.

Although in many ways they are anti-philosophy, since they are basically ideas we accept without examining them. I think a lot can be gained from identifying memes and cross-examining them.

I'm thinking of memes like "tattoo on lower back = she's a tramp".

Yes...but how does the memory get from one to another life? That is the tricky bit for a materialist, isn't it? Anyway, I know, wildly off topic, I will desist.

It seems to me that there is always a soft element in which the hard math core is embedded. But isn't evolutionary science able to more exactly measure it's object?

Don't get me wrong. I think the meme notion is fascinating.

Evolution has more concrete "carriers", and DNA is a more concrete form of "meaning".

This makes it easier to track, but in the historical sense differences between species are an approximation of the number of mutations after they branched from a common ancestor.

Memes may originate from a "common thinker", but it would be very difficult to track all of the mutations of that original meme back to that thinker without the meme being written down. So consider pre-written language comparable to the history of mutation before we were able to sequence genomes.

Comparing Catholics to Jews without a record of history is kind of like comparing species without the fossil record. We can tell how many mutations separate them, but not when or if they are of common ancestry.