Memes & The Ladder LO7291

GaltJohn22@aol.com
Wed, 8 May 1996 07:11:38 -0400

Replying to LO7251 --

I've been following this thread a bit, primarily watching for the topic of
"memes" to be taken up. Thought I'd do it myself.

Excuse me if this is at all redundant as I can't be sure I've seen all the
earlier messages.

"Memes" (Richard Dawkins coined it, I believe) are critical ideas in a
culture, sufficiently critical that the ideas replicate themselves and
evolve and, sometimes, split - like genes. I believe he was concatenating
"memory" and "genes" to produce the word memes.

What are critical ideas? A few examples may suffice: "tool", "weapon",
"lever", "fire", "arch", "democracy", "sufferage",

There are memes which evolve to dead ends: "flat earth", "prohibition",
"human sacrifices"

In a manner of speaking, "learning organization" is a meme, at least for
some of us.

Hal Popplewell
GaltJohn22@aol.com

-- 

GaltJohn22@aol.com

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>