Memetics evangelist, Susan Blackmore has a piece in New Scientist which suggests that replicated information in computers is distinct from memes, and therefore something new altogether.
“Evolution’s third replicator: Genes, meme, and now what?”
Biologist Larry Moran calls this pseudoscience.
Forget about the fact that I was talking about something similar to Blackmore’s ‘third replicators’ in the post below (it was under the tag ‘half baked ideas’, a non-scientific ramble), one of the problems with the idea of memes is that it imagines that memes are somehow different from genes. This opens up the inevitable possibility of a zoo of gene-like things as Blackmore suggests and Moran takes issue with.
At an abstract level, genes contain information, so do memes and Blackmore’s ‘third replicators’. One of the defining features of information is that it can be stored in different languages or media.
A better way to look at memes might be that genes are a particular flavor of meme instead of the current notion that memes are a by product of intelligent gene-based organisms
Hi, I bielive that the third replicator is not explained propore.The idea is the explaination of growth from genes (or cells) to the growth of langauge from bipedals that evolved from to communication that is global. We assume that language is the only way of communicating after grunts and mones from early bi pedals. Lets say you are working at your computer for three hours then you get up and see your neighbors tv flash giving a mores code . This mores code is intergrated into the movment of your curser pixel by pixel creating a language that is understandable and more advanced the lower meme bi pedal communication because your PAYING ATTENTION after 4 years relizing you understand the letter “A” in this new type of language. Yoo can do the math or algorithm studies by your enviroment to speed up the learning of this language that has been around for a long time.
There is a simple test for ‘the third replicator’ to see if it is relevant – is it a self replicator without a human programmer? It fails that test.