RE: virus: Book review

Robin Faichney (r.j.faichney@stir.ac.uk)
Wed, 11 Jun 1997 15:55:00 +0100


Grant wrote:
>On Tue, 10 Jun 1997, Robin Faichney wrote:
>
>> Grant wrote:
>> >The killing for territory is much older than man, and thus genetic.
>>
>> Is it? Could you explain your reasoning?
>
>Those behaviors that are present in all animals and predate the
>possibility of human memes just about have to be genetic in
>nature.

I don't believe that killing for territory is present even in
most animals, never mind all. Plus, I just came across
this in another list, written by a biologist:

===
What part of
the behaviour of an animal is inherited is very difficult to be
determined
even in *lower vertebrates* ( awfull term, but it's the one used in many
biology books ), such as fishes. Several researches have shown during
the
last 20 years that many behaviours that were believed to be inherited
are
learned by the young animals during their early stages of life ( I've
already mentioned a few weeks ago the example of the seagull's beak,
world-famous after Tynbergen's work ). In *higher* vertebrates (
especially
primates ) most of the behaviour is learned and developed throught the
time
thanks to social relationships.
===

Just as there is no point in physical evolution at which
we can say, before this is prehuman, after it is human,
I don't think we can clearly differentiate human from
non-human memes in evolutionary terms. And it's
certainly wrong to say that everything pre-human is
genetic.

>> >Using the name of God to justify it is memetic.
>> >Which set do you think is winning?
>>
>> Umm, what exactly is the competition?
>>
>Dominance.

But what sets are you talking about? Some people over others,
genes over memes, memes over other memes -- what are
you talking about??

Robin