At 03:06 PM 8/03/01 -0800, samantha wrote:
>For all the prattle locally about the power of evolution one of the
>prime aspects is not being applied in the evolution of memes. Evolution
>does not simply throw out was is. It builds on it and and modifies its
>function over time.
Weeeelllll.... Then again, power-law crunches every 100 million years total
the reigning system and push the re-set button. True, lots of low-level
building blocks are conserved (homeoboxen, etc), but the subsequent
ecologies and their components are drastically discontinuous in many
respects.
I wonder if that happens suitably faster in the memesphere. Those might be
Kuhnian paradigm dislocations, the sort that used to happen in science once
a century or more rarely but are presumably speeding up due to the sheer
number of educated brains on the planet, their interconnectivity, the
thrust of their (our) cultural dynamics, Moore's Law... The emergence of a
true hyperintelligent AI, for example, should be as drastic a memetic
dislocator as the K/T and earlier impacts. But so might the arrival of
drastic life-extension-cum-rejuvenation.
Meanwhile, admittedly, the slow drift model might well be the one to follow
in memetic engineering.
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:59:39 MDT