Getting some things right does not mean you get everything right. Just like Newton got physics right but also for a while postulated Alchemy.
Dawkins back in the 70s postulated "meme theory", and the word today has become part of society. But he is dead wrong about "memes" being anything more than mere marketing. Yes communication is physical, but thoughts are abstractions, not physical things even though they spread through communication. Much like you can measure speed but cannot equate the word "speed" to being the physical car itself.
There certainly is a science to physical communication, but I would not call "memes" anything more than marketing. Yes marketing works and both facts and fiction, good ideas and bad ideas can and do become popular. But we cannot treat ideas like atoms or DNA. If something becomes popular, fact or fiction, sure, it goes from host to host in a real physical sense, but the idea itself is still an abstraction.
If we are going to say that memes are physical things instead of abstractions, then we might as well also claim that particles and waves as some si fi wooers claim, can act like a fully in tact brain itself, and justify the universe as a cognition itself.
So the word "meme" really is nothing more than a word describing marketing, like a peacock trying to attract a female.
Dawkins back in the 70s postulated "meme theory", and the word today has become part of society. But he is dead wrong about "memes" being anything more than mere marketing. Yes communication is physical, but thoughts are abstractions, not physical things even though they spread through communication. Much like you can measure speed but cannot equate the word "speed" to being the physical car itself.
There certainly is a science to physical communication, but I would not call "memes" anything more than marketing. Yes marketing works and both facts and fiction, good ideas and bad ideas can and do become popular. But we cannot treat ideas like atoms or DNA. If something becomes popular, fact or fiction, sure, it goes from host to host in a real physical sense, but the idea itself is still an abstraction.
If we are going to say that memes are physical things instead of abstractions, then we might as well also claim that particles and waves as some si fi wooers claim, can act like a fully in tact brain itself, and justify the universe as a cognition itself.
So the word "meme" really is nothing more than a word describing marketing, like a peacock trying to attract a female.
