Do you like how Dawkins, Hitchens et al. represent atheists?

[Xev]

Thanks, I'll play squash..

<< Is there obvious proof that we could be alone in the Galaxy? Enrico Fermi thought so -- and he was a pretty smart guy. Might he have been right?

It's been a hundred years since Fermi, an icon of physics, was born (and nearly a half-century since he died). He's best remembered for building a working atomic reactor in a squash court. >>


Billy 1 Zev 0

try harder next time.

You win because you quote some random thing that misrepresents what Fermi thought?

Also, figure out what a paradox is.

"A paradox is an apparently true statement or group of statements that leads to a contradiction or a situation which defies intuition. "
-from Wikipedia

The Fermi-Hart paradox also has various solutions, which range from the difficulty of interstellar travel to the suggestion of some sort of alien "prime directive" forbidding such contact. Hell, even those whackos who think that the X-Files is a documentary show? They're smarter than you are, because they figured out a solution, namely that aliens are already among us.

Why don't you go play with your bacteria? I'm sure that they must be no small source of discomfort to you, being as they are to you as Bernhard Riemann is to Terry Schiavo.

I reiterate my suggestion to go play in the street - it would be a very useful way for you to play "squash" with a semi or two.

 

[iceaura]

Still nothing in particular about disinformation from Dawkins.

Can we assume that examples are hard to find?

We note that scientific frauds committed by theists, for the purpose of mocking evolutionary theory (which some theists find to be contrary to their theism, therefore false), are listed in linked reviews as evidence against the evolutionary theorists rather than the fundie theists.

 

[Atom]

The evidence is all around you, despite what the Abrahamic gods proclaim.

Earth couldn't possibly be the ONLY planet in the universe with life. In fact, we need not just search our own galaxy, scientists are searching for life in our very own back yard; within our solar system.

Weasel words as usual, Q.

Try sticking the word 'Intelligent' in there...I know you are only on nodding terms with the word but even you must know the difference between inteligent life and pond life.

 

[Atom]

Still nothing in particular about disinformation from Dawkins.

I love the way you guys avoid answering the question.

I'll ask it again...can you provide ANY evidence that 'memes' exist?

How is the memes virus spread?

 

[Atom]

You win because you quote some random thing that misrepresents what Fermi thought?

Also, figure out what a paradox is.

"A paradox is an apparently true statement or group of statements that leads to a contradiction or a situation which defies intuition. "
-from Wikipedia

The Fermi-Hart paradox also has various solutions, which range from the difficulty of interstellar travel to the suggestion of some sort of alien "prime directive" forbidding such contact. Hell, even those whackos who think that the X-Files is a documentary show? They're smarter than you are, because they figured out a solution, namely that aliens are already among us.

Why don't you go play with your bacteria? I'm sure that they must be no small source of discomfort to you, being as they are to you as Bernhard Riemann is to Terry Schiavo.

I reiterate my suggestion to go play in the street - it would be a very useful way for you to play "squash" with a semi or two.

Yes I did win and anyone on any forum I've been on knows full well that I ALWAYS win.

<< you quote some random thing >>

Er..well don't whine to me, go whine to Space.com and NASA.

 

[GeoffP]

I love the way you guys avoid answering the question.

I'll ask it again...can you provide ANY evidence that 'memes' exist?

How is the memes virus spread?

Meme: birds opening milk bottles in UK. Started in London, spread to all birds. Spread through observation. Acquired behaviour.

Done.

http://www.def-logic.com/articles/what_is_a_meme.html

http://www.def-logic.com/articles/RevealLanguageOfThought.html

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/03766357/1995/00000034/00000001/art00051

 

[S.A.M.]

Meme: birds opening milk bottles in UK. Started in London, spread to all birds. Spread through observation. Acquired behaviour.

Done.

http://www.def-logic.com/articles/what_is_a_meme.html

http://www.def-logic.com/articles/RevealLanguageOfThought.html

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/03766357/1995/00000034/00000001/art00051

Meme: rats going through maze, next generation starts where first one stops, even separated by distance, when using same maze. Explanation? Inherited learning?

 

[GeoffP]

Meme: rats going through maze, next generation starts where first one stops, even separated by distance, when using same maze. Explanation?

Paper where rats going through maze, next generation starts where first one stops. Citation? No got linky.

 

[S.A.M.]

Paper where rats going through maze, next generation starts where first one stops. Citation? No got linky.

http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=1493442&postcount=77

In the meantime, the puzzles about memory have grown even stranger. This part of our story will take us to one of the most controversial frontiers of current science, although it actually starts back in 1920 when W. McDougall, a biologist at Harvard, began an experiment to see if animals (in this case white rats) could inherit learning. The procedure was to teach the rats a simple task (avoiding a lighted exit), record how fast they learned, breed another generation, teach them the same task, and see how their rate of learning compared with their elders. He carried the experiment through 34 generations and found that, indeed, each generation learned faster in flat contradiction to the usual Darwinian assumptions about heredity. Such a result naturally raised controversy, and similar experiments were run to prove or disprove the result. The last of these was done by W.E. Agar at Melbourne over a period of 20 years ending in 1954. Using the same general breed of rats, he found the same pattern of results that McDougall had but in addition he found that untrained rats used as a control group also learned faster in each new generation. (Curiously, he also found that his first generation of rats started at the same rate of learning as McDougall's last generation.) No one had a good explanation for why both trained and untrained should be learning faster, but since this result did not support the idea that learning was inherited, the biology community breathed a sigh of relief and considered the matter closed.

Others:

Acquired traits have often been observed to pass throughout a species with no known means of direct transfer from individual to individual. For instance, in England in the 20s a small bird known as the blue tit learned to open milk bottles at doorsteps. When one bird learned the trick, others in the area learned it by simple imitation. But the blue tit doesn't fly more than a few miles, and this habit spread to several widely disparate areas in England by 1935 and continued popping up in faraway places throughout the forties, including Scandinavia and Holland. The habit appeared independently at least 89 times in the British Isles, and the spread of the habit accelerated as time went on. (Fisher and Hinde, 1949. British Birds 42:347-357.) Milk bottles practically disappeared in Holland during the war, and by the time they returned all the birds that had been opening them before the war could not have survived to see their return. Yet the habit rapidly returned when the bottles were re-introduced in 1947.

Arden Mahlberg, a psychologist, carried out a test of the ability to learn Morse Code. He had one group of subjects learn actual Morse Code, while another had to learn a newly-invented code that closely resembled it. He found that subjects were able to learn the actual code far more rapidly than the alternative, and he interpreted this as evidence that the subjects
were resonating with the millions of people who had already learned Morse code. Each time he replicated the experiment, he found that the difference in learning time between Morse code and the new one progressively decreased. This might mean that the initial results were false. But the fact that the decrease was progressive suggests that the morphic resonance of the new code was becoming progressively stronger as more and more students learned it. (Mahlberg, 1987. Journal of Analytical Psychology 32:23-34.)

So what is a meme?

 

[GeoffP]

Huh. Didn't konw about the rats. I'd say a meme should be called "acquired, subsequently transmitted knowledge". Gene demethylation or something for appropriate points in the brain. I think both would qualify as memes since they incorporate genetic effects.

 

[S.A.M.]

Huh. Didn't konw about the rats. I'd say a meme should be called "acquired, subsequently transmitted knowledge". Gene demethylation or something for appropriate points in the brain. I think both would qualify as memes since they incorporate genetic effects.

So is a telephone call from me to a friend discussing our experiment a meme?

 

[GeoffP]

If she passes the information on to her offspring at some proportional level, I think so.

 

[S.A.M.]

What is she doesn't but someone else does?


Do memes incorporate genetic effects? Cultural? Emotional? Religious? Gender? Height? Stage of wakefulness? Closeness to extinction? Color of the sky? Weather reports? Existential angst? Peeing on the carpet?

 

[GeoffP]

What is she doesn't but someone else does?


Do memes incorporate genetic effects? Cultural? Emotional? Religious? Gender? Height? Stage of wakefulness? Closeness to extinction? Color of the sky? Weather reports? Existential angst? Peeing on the carpet?

I think they should incorporate genetic effects. It sort of has the appeal of a genetically modified "surface" that preconditions behaviour. If each organism or evolutionary lineage has been around a long time, then it seems reasonable that there might exists reactive solutions to specific issues that might come up, without the specific issue being predefined. Maybe differences in generalized activation of brain subcomponents results in a greater ability to solve spatial problems.

 

[S.A.M.]

I think they should incorporate genetic effects. It sort of has the appeal of a genetically modified "surface" that preconditions behaviour. If each organism or evolutionary lineage has been around a long time, then it seems reasonable that there might exists reactive solutions to specific issues that might come up, without the specific issue being predefined. Maybe differences in generalized activation of brain subcomponents results in a greater ability to solve spatial problems.

What about the weather reports?

 

[(Q)]

I love the way you guys avoid answering the question.

I'll ask it again...can you provide ANY evidence that 'memes' exist?

How is the memes virus spread?

Please to note, Billy, that your questions DO get answered, and with good answers. Please don't accuse of avoiding to answer questions when you know you haven't answered questions.

That is a lesson learned, Billy.

 

[(Q)]

Weasel words as usual, Q.

Try sticking the word 'Intelligent' in there...I know you are only on nodding terms with the word but even you must know the difference between inteligent life and pond life.

Intelligence is merely a branch of evolution. Some lifeforms, not just humans, have evolved levels of intelligence, while others have not. Therefore, there isn't an expectation to find intelligent life when searching for it.

 

[GeoffP]

What about the weather reports?

Only if they cause frizzy hair.

 

[S.A.M.]

Only if they cause frizzy hair.

So what is a meme then? I know the "popular definition" but epistemologically it means nothing.

One new way of looking at it, which has probably developed from the meme concept is like this:

"Participatory Epistemology is a relatively new philosophical concept, paradigmatically articulated by Richard Tarnas and elaborated specifically in relation to Transpersonal psychology by Jorge Ferrer, Christopher Bache, and others. The Participatory Epistemology is constituted in the recognition that meaning is neither outside of the human mind, that is, in the "objective" world waiting to be discovered (the paradigmatically Modern/Structuralist worldview), nor that meaning is simply constructed or projected onto an inherently meaningless world by the "subjective" human mind (the paradigmatically Postmodern/Poststructuralist worldview). Rather, Tarnas argues, via Hegel, Goethe, Kuhn, Jung, and many other thinkers, that meaning is enacted through the participation of the human mind in the larger meaning of the cosmos. Thus, as in the dialectical movement that Hegel describes, the mind draws forth a meaning that exists in potentia in the cosmos, but which must go through the process of articulation by means of human consciousness. "

 

[(Q)]

So what is a meme?

From the link above - you really should read them.

"Memes are essentially sets of instructions that can be followed to produce behavior."

From this, you should be able to determine what would constitute a meme.

Therefore, you should be able to determine if a weather report is a meme.