Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Random Wanderers Post

From today, me to Terry Bristol, president of ISEPP, in response to something he posted about genetics, archiving to Wanderers list:

Question for ya Terry: in all your vast reading of the literature, what's your sense of the "meme" meme, i.e. are people still thinking in those terms (?) of "meme versus gene" or has "meme" maybe been abandoned as some anomalous 1990s cleverness we won't take seriously any more?

The reason I ask is I've decided I only care about memes, not genes, given how many other people have made "genes" their business. Plus memes take me into marketing and advertising, lucrative areas, plus I get to overlook a lot of the genetic differences people care about but I don't.

Anyway, I'll use your answer to help calibrate my barometer as to how the ambient culture is dealing with the meme meme. If I need to work harder to bring it back from some grave, I will, as I think it's too good a coin to just let fall by the wayside.

Kirby