Did anyone else catch Darkins on BBC2 (first week in December I think)
defending memetics against a theist and an artist? I only caught the
end of the discussion and got a significant feeling of deja-vu as I
saw all the same old alt.memetics arguments. Perhaps I should write to
the BBC and ask if I can have a transcript of the show to post to
usenet.

The basic anti-memetic argument was still "I think my beliefs are
fundamentally good, and I can't accept that they arrose my natural
selection". They do of course offer no explaination of how an idea can
be judged "good".

IMHO the problem most people seem to have with memes is that they
cannot bring themselves to consider *every* idea (not just a few
religious or cutural ones) as memes. They think the memeticist is
denegrating their ideas by calling them memes in just the same way
that some people regard the idea that organism exist because they are
gene carriers denigrates life.

Genetics can describe the evolotion of the whole gene pool but individual
genes contol the most fundamental aspects of life at the lowest
level. In the same way memes are/control the most fundamental elements
of mind. Some people reject this because they think it incompatible
with free will. It is no more incompatible with free will than any
other exlpanation of mind. I accept the possiblity that the mind may
be without explaination but since that is a dead end it is something I
must simply consider and put to one side like theism or solipsism.

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