ORB Visualization
(soon)
Communication from Steven Thiele
2/2/2004 10:38 PM
Proposing memes as an analogy of genes is doubly deficient. First it suffers from all the problems of explanation via analogy. Has there ever been a scientific breakthrough, even a minor one, resulting from an analogy assumed to hold in a different realm of organized life? Did Darwin argue by analogy in any significant way? What if he had said: 'Let's start with chemistry as the basis for an explanation of all life and look in biological life for something analogous to molecules'? Would he have got anywhere?
Second the view of genes (as 'selfish') which gave rise to the analogy is highly problematic. Genes are not the core phenomenon of biological life, they are one feature of it. Dawkins himself half indicated why when he wrote about 'Rediscovering the Organism' in The Extended Phenotype. What chance has the notion of memes got of explaining social life when it is an analogy of something in biological life of such questionable significance? No more chance, I would suggest, than the notion that social life is like an organism (this silly analogy has been proposed by more than a few sociologists, most notably by Durkheim). The point is, social life is not like anything else - no more so than biological life is like anything else.
Steven Thiele