Are you skeptical about the meme theory?

[A Christian Sceptic]

Just wondering:

Are any of you skeptical of the meme theory (memetics) that Richard Dawkins came up with? It's my understanding it's still under development and debate.

[brodski]

I was unaware that meme's had risen to the staus of theory. It's a useful little metaphor, but I doubt its going anywhere fast.

[A Christian Sceptic]

I was unaware that meme's had risen to the staus of theory. It's a useful little metaphor, but I doubt its going anywhere fast.

Richard Dawkins invented the word and then created a theory around it. I've seen the word used alot here. I learned briefly about it in an Evloutionary Psychology class I took - but just as a theoretical idea.

[Loss Leader]

Wasn't this the topic of, like, a five million post thread?

[A Christian Sceptic]

Wasn't this the topic of, like, a five million post thread?

Beats me. The question came to me after coming across it in other threads. If it is a previous thread please direct me to it.

[Ichneumonwasp]

What theory did he create around it?

I am aware that he uses the word and that it is loosely used to support the concept that ideas spread and that better ideas tend to win in the marketplace.

Is there something else to it? That doesn't sound like a particularly controversial topic to bring up for discussion, but I may have it all wrong.

[A Christian Sceptic]

What theory did he create around it?

I am aware that he uses the word and that it is loosely used to support the concept that ideas spread and that better ideas tend to win in the marketplace.

Is there something else to it? That doesn't sound like a particularly controversial topic to bring up for discussion, but I may have it all wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics

[Ichneumonwasp]

Right, but what theory did he develop about it?

He proposed it and uses it as an idea. But I still don't see what theory he developed around it.

I know that Susan blackmore and Dan Dennett have written quite a bit about it. Do you mean their theories?

What are we supposed to be skeptical about with it? That ideas replicate and change? I don't think anyone is skeptical of that -- we see it happen on a daily basis.

[biomorph]

Just wondering:

Are any of you skeptical of the meme theory (memetics) that Richard Dawkins came up with? It's my understanding it's still under development and debate.

I came up with a similar concept on the same subject matter in an informal discussion with some software developers and armchair philosophers over several months.

we called them RMV's (Replicating Mind Viruses) founding the concept on software viruses found on computers and attempting to draw philosophical parallels with human thought processes.

We managed to get the basics laid down and ran into some minor problems over free will plus some other issues which are not found as parallels in the hardware side, that focused around the actual biology vs technology side of things..

we didn't get to actual realisation proper until we abandoned the concept that the human mind would fight the virus off, ie have some sort of immunity naturally to being influenced by noncultural (to us) ideologies.

we then went and found out a bit more about learning processes, and found that we had not realised the impressionability of the uneducated mind.

We thought humans were more questioning (doubtful) than they actually were, especially as children.

When we found this error of estimation we realised we were on to something and started looking for examples and functions to support our ideas (thats all they were, ideas)

When we actually changed the questions we were asking and abandoned the mindset of human mental infallibility we embraced what we could plainly see as strong support (in our limited part-time way) for the concept.


I'm not sure of the dates here, but I think this was around 15 yrs ago. None of us had even heard of Dawkins.

So no, I'n not skeptical at all that an eminent biologist should put forward such a hypothesis.

If the hypothesis fails, I could expect good reasons why, based on some reality, not theology..

So not skeptical at all, and i further more consider it a reality in actuality.

I would however treat with skeptisim (and enquiry) claims that memes are not a viable hypothesis.

[biomorph]

Wasn't this the topic of, like, a five million post thread?

no idea, was it?

[A Christian Sceptic]

I came up with a similar concept on the same subject matter in an informal discussion with some software developers and armchair philosophers over several months.

<SNIP>

So not skeptical at all, and i further more consider it a reality in actuality.

I would however treat with skeptisim (and enquiry) claims that memes are not a viable hypothesis.

That is fascinating. Independent idea of the concept from your group. Do you think it helped that you had an idea about computer viruses? Did your group of armchair philosophers come to a conclusion on if all ideas worked the same way you were concluding? Did it appear dependent on the recipient of the RMV / Meme and their awareness that they might be receiving it?

[JJM]

The notion of a meme seems to be just that, a notion (or, perhaps, a model). It is certainly not a theory (an idea that that has been thoroughly tested, and held up under that scrutiny).

"Meme" has always seemed to me to be a name invented to describe the self-evident notion that ways of thinking and acting are passed from one generation to the next.

That is not to minimize the value of noting self-evident ideas and bringing them out of obscurity and analyzing them. Recognizing that we are susceptible to confirmation bias (observed by one of the Bacons, centuries ago) led to the development of the scientific method.

[Big Les]

Meme to me = the sort of oral tradition we've had for thousands of years, but much amplified by mass media.

[rocketdodger]

"Meme" has always seemed to me to be a name invented to describe the self-evident notion that ways of thinking and acting are passed from one generation to the next.

Memetics goes a little deeper than that, though, as memes can be transferred/take hold at any time in one's life. I.E. they don't simply get passed on generational boundaries.

The analogy with computer software is a very strong one -- the main difference is that brain software has the ability to modify brain hardware to some extent. How much this changes the analysis is anyone's guess, although I suspect it would have the effect of making resident memes harder to get rid of.

[JJM]

Memetics goes a little deeper than that, though, as memes can be transferred/take hold at any time in one's life. I.E. they don't simply get passed on generational boundaries.
{snip}I am not certain what you mean. Surely, a person can take an older observation and use it without being in a direct line of inheritance (and regardless of age at the time of acquiring the information).

Any person (heritage or not) can act on a meme at any time, as I understand it. That does not make it "deeper."

[rocketdodger]

By deeper I meant "not just that simple."

I was only pointing out that memes are different than genes insofar as a gene, once changed, only affects the next generation of carriers. Memes are not limited in this way as they immediately affect their current carriers.

[biomorph]

That is fascinating. Independent idea of the concept from your group. Do you think it helped that you had an idea about computer viruses?

Yes. We used the computer analogy as a base line, sort of.
As computers had no power over infection, because they could not judge the harmful from the beneficial, until armed with AV programs.
More like a starting point, I think if we'd known more about actual biological viruses maybe we'd have started there too.

We did recognise early on that computers were not as self referential as brains, and it was only used as a very basic ground reference. we knew the difference, or at least, we thought we did........

Did your group of armchair philosophers come to a conclusion on if all ideas worked the same way you were concluding?

That is a very good point, as regards the flow of information, yes.
However we concentrated on ones that use some of that information transfer to implant a replication componant directly with the structure of the habitee.
In other words, the commands to replicate and expand into uninhabited hosts (by that particular version) had to be there otherwise we thought it might have died out..replication was part of its structure, it's goals, and expansionist (usually) requirements.

we also tried to divide the RMV's into a further classification as to whether the actual information replicated was descriptive factually of reality.
(This ignored pretty much the replicative part of the data, it contained all the rest though I think).
If they were factual we used the term "useful".
The ones that were not we described as "self serving", ie. the continuity of its own existence was at least present, equal to, or more of an important a function within it than the actual data.
Useful RMV's appeared to us to be not requiring the "pass it on" instruction set to function, as the continuity of existence was by outside means, that is, factual observation at some point of reality.

Later on we changed the classification system to revise the term "RMV" into only the self serving ones. All the rest were (to us) only data.

From now on I'll be using only that definition for RMV's here.


Did it appear dependent on the recipient of the RMV / Meme and their awareness that they might be receiving it?
We thought at some point that;

The RMV's were not dependant on the hosts awareness as such.. They tried to replicate regardless given the opportunity.
They seemed to consider any "uninhabited" or "inhabited by a rival" host to be a candidate.

When reception by the host was governed by the defence system of a rival RMV, how embedded the rival RMV was in the potential host was a factor as well for example.

When the defence system was otherwise, usually, not always, it took the form of some sort of innoculation.

This was because a very high proportion of the population were actually inhabited almost from birth with an RMV in essence. So they had been somehow able to shake it off we considered.

We also thought that innoculation might be the presence of the data only type amongst others.(non RMV) We found this to be a factor.

Age and mental fitness also was a part of the strength of the defence against inhabitance, particulally if the host had an early habitation of a similar type of RMV and had removed it without the "data only" type being present.......

does that suit you?

We certainly thought there were flaws in our understanding of the RMV's. We just were not sure what they were though mostly, the ones we found we demolished, or we never got to the stage where we had the knowledge to find more problems....time ran out i guess and we ran with what we had......as you do sometimes.:) this was around '94-ish if memory serves me right....we still thought too that we might be taking to simplistic approach. We were rank amatures really, just talking you know.......about data.


i read Dawkins a few years later, and only recently the latest works. I remember sitting there, thinking afterwards, how innocently and unknowingly we'd almost got it, we just had'nt considered our discussions more than idle speculation really. We'd just lightly scratched a different surface, compared to RD, if that.

[mijopaalmc]

Evolutionary biologist and philosopher of science Massimo Pigliucci explains some of the problems with memetics in The Trouble With Memetics (http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1052527/the_trouble_with_memetics/index.html).

[bokonon]

I haven't gotten around to reading The Selfish Gene, so my opinion isn't the most informed. It seems to me that a lot of people use "meme" as nothing more than a synonym for "idea." I usually experience a twinge of annoyance when I hear it, and (mostly without justification, I'm sure) a feeling that the person using the word is trying to spice up his conversation with unnecessary jargon. I never considered it anything more than a metaphor for cultural inertia.

[Dr Adequate]

I don't think there's enough of it to be skeptical about: it's one of those ideas that's "not even wrong".

It's like Swiss Toni (http://www.jokefile.co.uk/rich/swisstony.html) saying: "Driving a car is like making love to a beautiful woman ..."

Well, it might be, in a sense, so I am not skeptical of his claim, but the result of hearing his analogy doesn't make me any better at driving a car. Or making love to a beautiful woman, for that matter.

[Cuddles]

Wasn't this the topic of, like, a five million post thread?

Aggh! The memes are reproducing!

[athon]

Memetics isn't as much a theory but an analogy. Basically any complex system which has randomly created elements competing for resources subscribes to a form of adaptation. Economics, languages, genetics, computing...all have features of evolution. So describing one field specifically as 'memetics' isn't so much as a theory as a way of extending the understanding of genetic evolution everybody is familiar with even further.

I don't understand the fuss people make over it. It makes no new predictions or explains any new phenomena. It simply draws parallels between two systems which demonstrate the same principles of evolution.

Athon

[biomorph]

Evolutionary biologist and philosopher of science Massimo Pigliucci explains some of the problems with memetics in The Trouble With Memetics (http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1052527/the_trouble_with_memetics/index.html).
Right at the start his definition IMO is not the one I would use really, which leads me to think he has missed the point maybe.

A meme, according to the by-now-standard dictionary definition, is "an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.

This probably needs to be more like

A meme, is an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by it's own (nongenetic) self replication system.

Under the definition I've given above, his argument fails.
A tune and a meme are not the same.

My definition is the latter, and quoting from some dictionary to use as the definition is perhaps a little unwise. Its correct in part, but misses the fundamental distinction between self replicating or replication by exterior means.

Would you consider that the case mijo?

[sphenisc]

Right at the start his definition IMO is not the one I would use really, which leads me to think he has missed the point maybe.

A meme, according to the by-now-standard dictionary definition, is "an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.

This probably needs to be more like

A meme, is an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by it's own (nongenetic) self replication system.

Under the definition I've given above, his argument fails.
A tune and a meme are not the same.

My definition is the latter, and quoting from some dictionary to use as the definition is perhaps a little unwise. Its correct in part, but misses the fundamental distinction between self replicating or replication by exterior means.

Would you consider that the case mijo?

"Self" in self-replicating refers to "what is replicated" not "the means of replication".

The important thing is that the replica more strongly resembles the individual it is a replica of than a random member of the class of replicators. It is a replica of the 'self', the individual - not just another one of the same class.

The means of replication is largely irrelevant to the evolutionary process, as long as replication happens it doesn't matter how it's mechanically accomplished. Computer and biological viruses will evolve without (generally) contributing much to the actual process other than the template for the co-opted machinery to copy. However it will still be self-replication because the new viruses will be copies of the template.

[Wowbagger]

(I'm copying and pasting most of this, from another post I once made, here.)

It could be useful to model both Genes and Memes as basic "replicators". They can be called such, if they exhibit the following properties very well:

Longevity: The longevity of a single copy is not as important as the longevity of any copy of that "information". A single instance of a gene may die, but it has the ability to live on, as new copies in offspring. A single instance of a meme may "die" (if a specific person dies, or merely forgets the idea), but the idea it conveys has some ability to live on, as new copies in other people.

Fecundity: The ability to reproduce. Some specific items may reproduce more effectively than others, because they are subject to selection pressures. Genes that are more successful in passing themselves on, have higher fecundity. This usually means they are beneficial to the overall survival of the host, but not always.
Memes have the ability to reproduce, by getting "absorbed" into people's minds. (Humans are particularly susceptible to these replicators, because of our pliable brain structure.) Some are more successful than others, and, like genes, this success is not always to the overall benefit of the host. They copy well, because they copy well.

Copy-Fidelity: The ability to be copied with minimal, if any, errors. Genes clearly have an advantage, here, because they are reliant on a physical structure. Memes are more prone to errors, because they have no physical presence. Memes "sacrifice" physical presence for more efficient fecundity. But, even so, it is possible that the evolution of social ideas can be tracked, and broken down into individual memes, for social modeling purposes.

(Based on ideas in The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins, rewritten in my own words.)

[biomorph]

"Self" in self-replicating refers to "what is replicated" not "the means of replication".

not sure about that. at all........

The important thing is that the replica more strongly resembles the individual it is a replica of than a random member of the class of replicators. It is a replica of the 'self', the individual - not just another one of the same class.

not sure that is that important. I'm dealing with classes here. I get your point though as regards the rest .

The means of replication is largely irrelevant to the evolutionary process, as long as replication happens it doesn't matter how it's mechanically accomplished.

in some cases, yes , in this case no. i'm more interested in the mechanics of the replication and the distinction between replication methods. ie built-in, and exterior if you see what I mean...


Computer and biological viruses will evolve without (generally) contributing much to the actual process other than the template for the co-opted machinery to copy. However it will still be self-replication because the new viruses will be copies of the template.

Not sure about any of that. Are you?

[biomorph]

Wowbagger, thats sounds like sense.

[Wowbagger]

Evolutionary biologist and philosopher of science Massimo Pigliucci explains some of the problems with memetics in The Trouble With Memetics (http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1052527/the_trouble_with_memetics/index.html).
Pigliucci, it seems, gets the story wrong. I comment on a few excerpts of that article:

unlike the case of genes, there doesn't seem to be any distinction between memes themselves and the phenotypes they produce. Well, not quite. Genes are also distinguished by their phenotypes! The spot where one gene ends and another begins is determined by the effects they have. And, they are also distinguished from useless or "junk" DNA strands, through phenotypic evaluation.

The second problem with memes is that nobody seems to know what their physical basis is.Ah, this is a valid point. Genes have well defined structural elements of DNA, and memes have none. (You can not even claim that brain patterns are the structure, because such patterns are likely to be different in different people for the same meme.)
However, even lacking a physical structure, it could still be useful to model social behavior in units of selection.

It is clearly more difficult to distinguish what constitutes one meme, from a separate meme, but that is why each study of memetics usually develops a working definition for the context of that study. Actually, genes are not much different: The defining factors often vary from paper to paper, as well, though admittedly to a lesser extent.

more crucial problem with the idea of memes: it is not predictive. Why, on Earth, would there be a journal devoted to the scientific study of memes, if they had no predictive power?
Why can't hypotheses, based on memetics, be testable?

For example, some folks (I will try to provide a link, later) developed a hypothesis that religions in the U.S. became more powerful, because the State was founded as secular: Religions had to exploit more insidious psychology to gain followers, than most other countries, where there is an officially sanctioned religion.
One can predict that religious memes in the U.S. should take on characteristics closer to "corporate" memes, than in the history of most other countries.

Just because Pigliucci can't come up with a way to test the theory, does not mean no one else will be able to.

[Beerina]

For example, some folks (I will try to provide a link, later) developed a hypothesis that religions in the U.S. became more powerful, because the State was founded as secular: Religions had to exploit more insidious psychology to gain followers, than most other countries, where there is an officially sanctioned religion.
One can predict that religious memes in the U.S. should take on characteristics closer to "corporate" memes, than in the history of most other countries.

Just because Pigliucci can't come up with a way to test the theory, does not mean no one else will be able to.


One can make predictions indeed. Think of how they overlap with a "political narrative" that a party generates to win elections. The narrative that wins the election thus "reproduces" into the next generation. The losing party's narrative will adapt, or they will lose more elections.

That these ideas adapt-or-die can be used to make predictions about actual meme instances.

We've seen it with religion, which, in the face of each new scientific development, gets re-cast with a whole new part of their writings "re-interpreted" to be metaphorical. Worse, religion used to squelch opposition. Then along came the freedom meme, and with it the idea that nothing should be forbidden to discuss. Suddenly, a god who wanted his political opposition silenced took on an unethical aura.

But God is good and perfect, and cannot have such an aura. Ok, I guess God's fine with you wondering if He exists. (But you'd better eventually come to the conclusion He does!)


Of course, that religion and politics adapt-or-die has long been noted for centuries, so it's kind of a cheat to suggest they fulfill a "prediction", especially when observation of what happened also suggests "adaptation" in the future. Still, it should be possible to come up with other examples.

[CaptainManacles]

We did recognise early on that computers were not as self referential as brains, and it was only used as a very basic ground reference. we knew the difference, or at least, we thought we did........


Computers are about as self referential as you can get. Any turing machine can emulate any other possible turing machine that does or can exist including itself and can reprogram itself on the fly.

Yes. We used the computer analogy as a base line, sort of.
As computers had no power over infection, because they could not judge the harmful from the beneficial, until armed with AV programs.

That's exactly like humans. Most people today cannot tell that they have been infected with a mind virus, and they cannot without another "program" which helps them identify and eliminate them.

[biomorph]

Computers are about as self referential as you can get. Any turing machine can emulate any other possible turing machine that does or can exist including itself and can reprogram itself on the fly.
well i guess that maybe the wrong word i've used there, i think we were trying to seperate the automata from the less so, however i can see this still has problems even then.

agreed


That's exactly like humans. Most people today cannot tell that they have been infected with a mind virus, and they cannot without another "program" which helps them identify and eliminate them.

spot on

[rocketdodger]

That's exactly like humans. Most people today cannot tell that they have been infected with a mind virus, and they cannot without another "program" which helps them identify and eliminate them.

I came up with the notion of the "guardian" meme, which I like to think runs like an OS kernel, denying access to the system to other memes that aren't qualified.

The rule for the guardian meme is "let no meme run its own code unless it explicitly includes the directive to search through other memes in the hopes of being replaced by a more useful one."

[volatile]

"The second problem with memes is that nobody seems to know what their physical basis is."

That sounds like T'ai Chi's "How much does a meme weigh?" criticism. It's absurd, and I'm quite surprised to see such a silly statement coming from someone who is eviently otherwise quite smart.

In fact, this whole brouhaha reminds me of Sokal's "Intellectual Impostures", whose argument boiled down to "Derrida is bad at maths". Just because the meme concept, model, analogy or even theory is derived from genetics, that does not mean a meme must resemble a gene in every respect for the analogy, model, concept or theory to make sense.

In essence, when Pigliucci, says "it begins to point toward a disanalogy between genes and memes", he's missing the point entirely.

[cyborg]

Complaining about the lack of a physical basis for memes is like complaining DNA doesn't come labelled with A, T, C and G.

[Beerina]

It's like whining about what's the physical basis for the story of Snow White. By exhausting deconstruction, you could get memes or Snow White down to ideas instantiated as interpretation on atoms on a page, or in a mind, or electrons floating around the Internet, along with their "reproduction" being interactions and copying via said energies and atoms, I suppose.

[Cuddles]

It's like whining about what's the physical basis for the story of Snow White. By exhausting deconstruction, you could get memes or Snow White down to ideas instantiated as interpretation on atoms on a page, or in a mind, or electrons floating around the Internet, along with their "reproduction" being interactions and copying via said energies and atoms, I suppose.

At this point it's probably worth mentioning "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" by Salman Rushdie.

[Belz...]

Complaining about the lack of a physical basis for memes is like complaining DNA doesn't come labelled with A, T, C and G.

:D

[mijopaalmc]

I see most people only read the first couple paragraphs of Pigliucci's article because they seem to have missed the discussion of how memetics fails to distinguish meaningfully between the replicator and the interactor. Such a distinction is at least essential for the analogy memetics to genetics because changes in the interactor are rarely, if ever, inheritied by the next generation in genetics whereas changes in the replicator and their heritability form the basis of genetics.

[athon]

I see most people only read the first couple paragraphs of Pigliucci's article because they seem to have missed the discussion of how memetics fails to distinguish meaningfully between the replicator and the interactor. Such a distinction is at least essential for the analogy memetics to genetics because changes in the interactor are rarely, if ever, inheritied by the next generation in genetics whereas changes in the replicator and their heritability form the basis of genetics.

I fail to see how this discredits the comparison. Nobody said the systems were identical, however there are obvious parallels to be considered; that when you have a complex system which contain changing elements and selection pressures, evolution will occur. There will be differences in the mechanisms, of course. They are not identical systems. But there is a principle which can be observed, from which we can propose predictions.

Athon

[mijopaalmc]

I fail to see how this discredits the comparison. Nobody said the systems were identical, however there are obvious parallels to be considered; that when you have a complex system which contain changing elements and selection pressures, evolution will occur. There will be differences in the mechanisms, of course. They are not identical systems. But there is a principle which can be observed, from which we can propose predictions.

Athon

Would you say that a square is a four-sided triangle and a triangle a three-sided square because they are both convex polygons?

The point that, as far as describing the actual processes goes, is does no good to try to explain a process where there is no replicator/interactor distinction in terms of a process where there is one.

[epeos76]

I think the last part of the article resonates most with me.



Indeed, memetics-at least for now-doesn't seem to add anything to the standard view of gene-culture co-evolution that was developed well before Dawkins put down his ideas in The Selfish Gene. Ideas clearly do evolve, and there is in fact a somewhat undeniable analogy between memes and the evolution of genes. But we don't need to push that analogy too far, and we certainly don't need a whole new vocabulary to make sense of it.

However after reading Wowbangers' example:



One can predict that religious memes in the U.S. should take on characteristics closer to "corporate" memes, than in the history of most other countries.

Just because Pigliucci can't come up with a way to test the theory, does not mean no one else will be able to.


I can at least imagine getting some milage out of this hypothesis, subject to further refinement.

I think my principle concern is that at this early stage it is too easy to misapplied. It can lend a sort of false precision to a narrative that obscures the interesting part of the dynamics at work.

It's similar to how easy it is to tell little false tales about gender dynamics in the language of evolution. For example, that old charmer about man, the noble hunter, and women, the selfless stay at home mom, has spawned a healthy progeny of just-so stories.

No reason to throw out the idea, but a good reason to apply a healthy dose of skepticism when it's used that way.

[athon]

Would you say that a square is a four-sided triangle and a triangle a three-sided square because they are both convex polygons?

No. Meaning?

The point that, as far as describing the actual processes goes, is does no good to try to explain a process where there is no replicator/interactor distinction in terms of a process where there is one.

Well done. I say I don't see your point, and you just repeat it. If it made no sense the first time, it still won't make sense a second.

I'm saying the fact there is no distinction between a replicator and interactor in memetics while there is one in genetics matters not one iota when both are analogous in terms of being evolving systems. You could say a horse and a car differ in that one is mechanical and the other biological, but that doesn't dismiss both are forms of transport. In that field they are analogous.

Athon

[cyborg]

You could say a horse and a car differ in that one is mechanical and the other biological, but that doesn't dismiss both are forms of transport. In that field they are analogous.

Mijo will read this as:

"Are you saying a horse is a four wheeled car and a car is a four legged horse?"

He doesn't seem to get the distinction between X is not Y and X is related to Y therefore they are both Z.

[bruto]

I'm skeptical that discussion of memes will ever achieve true gravitas.

[Belz...]

I'm saying the fact there is no distinction between a replicator and interactor in memetics while there is one in genetics matters not one iota when both are analogous in terms of being evolving systems. You could say a horse and a car differ in that one is mechanical and the other biological, but that doesn't dismiss both are forms of transport. In that field they are analogous.

Don't tell that to jimbob or Matteo or Mijo or PresidentBush. They might point out that cars don't self-replicate and this invalidates the analogy.



Uh-oh. You DID tell it to Mijo, didn't you ?

[rocketdodger]

The point that, as far as describing the actual processes goes, is does no good to try to explain a process where there is no replicator/interactor distinction in terms of a process where there is one.

Except for the fact that the notion of natural selection doesn't include any such distinction.