Article

2004-03-15

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Posted by Korora 2004-03-15 9:53:13 AM|| || Front Page|| [1 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 Good article, even though I can't abide Stephen J Gould, who is a superficially reasonable version of Noam Chomsky.

Posted by Phil B 2004-3-15 10:03:43 AM|| 2004-3-15 10:03:43 AM|| Front Page Top

#2 Phil_B - Gould isn't a bad evolutionary biologist, regardless of his prick quotient. He's a prime example of one of my operational maxims:
Always give credit where due, then kick the shit out of the asshat.

Wretchard the Cat certainly has a style all his own - and the content is always provocative. One of my favorite sites. 8^)

Posted by .com 2004-3-15 10:13:38 AM|| 2004-3-15 10:13:38 AM|| Front Page Top

#3 .com if you are interested in evolutionary biology read Richard Dawkins he is incomparably better than SJG. BTW I am extremely sensitive to ideology mascerading as science which SJG is frequently guilty of. As was K Marx.

Posted by Phil B 2004-3-15 10:29:52 AM|| 2004-3-15 10:29:52 AM|| Front Page Top

#4 Phil_B - Point taken - mixing personal ideology with science = junk science. I'm glad you brought up Dawkins... I thought I knew about him, but after googling him again, I've discovered he's more revolutionary and insightful than I thought! From his bio, it appears he may be The Meme Man, in addition to The Gene Man I thought he was. Cool info:

"But looking at the richness and complexity of life on Earth, Dawkins freely acknowledged that an ethology of the gene alone was simply not robust enough to explain evolution. So he applied a Darwinian view of culture, as well. Dawkins argued for the concept of memes - ideas that are, to use the felicitous phrase of William Burroughs, "viruses of the mind." Memes are to cultural inheritance what genes are to biological heredity. A meme for, say, astrology, could parasitize a mind just as surely as a hookworm could infest someone's bowels. Ideas - like genes - could compete and cooperate, mutate and conserve. They, too, are operated on by natural selection. Human evolution, Dawkins postulates, is a function of a co-evolution between genes and memes.

Even that was not enough. Dawkins's intellectual adventure went well beyond the ethology of genes and memes to explore an even more radical insight into the nature of evolutionary dynamics. This idea, too, was astonishingly simple, but it offers a powerful intellectual framework for a new understanding of life as an information process.

What do genes and memes have in common? Dawkins asked. They are replicators. Through various but distinct coded systems, they reproduce; they effect change in their world so they can propagate, just like viruses in either digital or organic form. Dawkins's most powerful paradigm is that the unit of evolution is not the individual - the gene - or the meme, but the replicator."

Thx for the response!

Posted by .com 2004-3-15 11:05:29 AM|| 2004-3-15 11:05:29 AM|| Front Page Top

#5 The spin on the wasp is bullshit.

my opinion here

Posted by Ptah 2004-3-15 6:39:43 PM|| [http://www.crusaderwarcollege.org] 2004-3-15 6:39:43 PM|| Front Page Top

#6 Umm. The REAL wasp. Wretchard's comparison of lefties/Islamists to the wasp is right on.

Posted by Ptah 2004-3-15 6:40:39 PM|| [http://www.crusaderwarcollege.org] 2004-3-15 6:40:39 PM|| Front Page Top

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