Kenny comments on Raising the Sanity Waterline - Less Wrong

112 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 March 2009 04:28AM

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Comment author: Kenny 20 September 2013 03:06:04PM 1 point [-]

What exactly do you mean by being "rigorous about them"?

Some seemingly 'rigorous' ways of studying memes that spring to mind:

  • Archaeologists studying the dissemination of arrowhead technology
  • Linguists studying the geographic distribution of phonemes among dialects of a language
  • Biblical studies
  • Etymology

It's not clear that memes are copied with a high enough degree of fidelity to really be subject to evolution by natural selection, but they certainly share the other structural characteristics of genes, namely variation and differential fitness.