Elmo Recio
Cognitive Psychology
Psych 330-001
WEEK 5 SUMMARY 4
[BACKGROUND INFORMATION FOR MIDTERM PAPER]

I have been eagerly awaiting this week’s topic of Learning and Knowledge Acquisition. As of late, due to a friend of mine, I have gotten into the whole science, per se, of Memetics. I am reading a book called “Snow Crash” by Neil Stephenson. It is a futuristic sci-fi thriller. However, most major points in the book are based off of facts (both computer wise, and on this particular subject of Memetics).

Memetics is the spread of fundimental ideas. And much like the analogy that has been drawn between genetic algorithms (including the adaptation of the whole biological nomenclature -applied to computers), this is a new analogy to genes and chromosomes. However, it now has to do with the spread of knowledge and knowledge acquisition. The meme in this case is considered a virus that “infects” its hosts and changes what they do by infiltrating a fundimental ideology.

I hopped on the web and retrieved several documents. Much to my surprise the web is full of such documents. This one resides at the address: [http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1998/vol2/best_ml.html]

This document is a critique by Michael L. Best on Aaron Lynch’s “Units, events and dynamics, in memetic evolution.” published in the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission. Best basically tears the journal article into pieces. Some of his reasons stated for countering Lynch’s formula is it’s sheer complexity. He says that the formula’s complexity makes it difficult to achieve any analytic and/or numerical progress. Best then attacks Lynch’s model of the negatively defined mnemon (a mnemon prefixed with a ~). Best states that this is a type of forgetting which does not exist “within human cultural evolution”.

This puts quite a spin on the model of memetic evolution. Having read the first article and written a paper on it (Exploration of Memetics and Memes), I see what best is trying to say as far as Lynch’s inaccuracies are concerned. I believe that further investigation on the subject must be allowed to develop unhindered. In this way we might be able to delve deeper into the subject of memetic evolution, and go from the metaphysical aspects of memetics to the more empirical aspects.