Johannes,
About the whale story,
New scientist wondered what was so attractive about the new song.
According to Mike Noad, the whales are stimulated by novelty and that it was
the very strangeness of the song that made it attractive.
To keep a long story short, Noad implies a lot with this. No doubt he knows a lot
about whales and whales songs, I don 't !
But, from a human perspective a reason for changing their song could be that the
females in their group were lured away by the males singing the song.
To keep up the pace, as a reaction to a than changing environment, the other
whales had to learn the song very quickly.
Eventually they did and now every whale is singing the same song.
Humans and whales share historical evolutionary processes, that is, we ' re both
mammals, presumebly we do have than the ' same ' abilities towards learning,
childcare and social behaviour.
Memes would be in principle the same, just put on another branch of the evolutio-
nary tree, in the context of mammals that is.
I do think, in order to stay ' being a male whale ' that a male had to ' react ' to
the new song, in the context of course, that the new song was lurking away his
mate.
An analogy, a guy in a Porche is lurking away all the girls. What do we do beside
going home and crying our eyes out !? We buy ourselves a Ferrari !!
That will teach him.
In my book, memes are in that sense independent that they don 't have any
concern about you and me or any concern about the result of their actions for
that matter. Memes have an agenda on their own and in a sense a life on their
own, that is, each idea and each nuance drawn out of each idea has its own li-
neage, has its own niche wherein its evolutionary process takes place.
Unless we find a common ground, wherein, lets say memes can be applied in
the level of Intellect, there will be a discordance between Moq and Memetics.
I think, like Richard Ridge would argue that memetics can contribute to the
' reason- aspect ' of our behavior.
IMO, and I do defend this upon the Memetic discussion list, Memetics must come
out in the open, showing how it works in practice. Staying in the ivory tower will
lead to its end...
Best regards,
Kenneth
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