Hello folks,
I've been studying this "Meme" stuff, and its increasingly apparent
that none of it shows up in the mainstream "respectable" publications.
Most of it seems dispersed in the shady back alleys of
non-peer-reviewed websites, and books that are more of non-dramatic
Science Fiction than anything more.
So, my question to the more enlightened among you all is, should a
serious student of science bother about this "Meme" stuff at all?
Like, for instance, there's Genetics, which seems to be [Memetics']
inspiration, only the former has a viable physico-chemical substrate
in the form of the DNA molecule that explains every chain of causation
from the atom to the chromosome and upwards. I for sure haven't come
across any similar faultlessly extensive chain of causation for
"Memetics".
My take on this situation is this, okay so there's some smoke, so
people reason there might be fire. Only, nobody knows the parameters
of this fire, so everybody's just shooting in the dark. "Memetics" is
the unfortunate progeny of such groping in the dark. Maybe, sometime
in the future, we might get a better understanding of the issues in
this context. But, by then, the term "Memetics" will have been so
discredited, we'd need a newer term for the phenomenon.
Caroline Brandt
Christchurch,
Oxford, UK
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