Macromemetics

Macromemetics

Abstract
1. Introduction and Summary
2. Western Philosophy Divided
3. The Hierarchical Structure of the Meme Pool and Popper"s World 3
3.1 Meme pools and the total cultural apparatus of societies
4. The Cultural Evolutionary School of Social Anthropology
4.1 Evolutionary Analysis of Civilisations
5. Memetics and 20th Century Philosophy
5.1 Memes and Pragmatism
5.2 Popper and Evolutionary Epistemology
5.3 Saussure and Signifiers
5.4 Foucault and the Episteme
6. Conclusion: The Role of Memetics
References

Towards a Framework for the Re-unification of Philosophy

The review of the philosophical and scientific antecedents of memetics by Elan Moritz [27] is extended to cover 20th century philosophy. It is proposed that `macromemetics‘, ie. the study of the evolution of entire meme pools, is in many respects a similar enterprise to that attempted by the cultural evolutionist school of anthropology which flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Memetics may provide a new, and more rigorously Darwinian, slant to this rather neglected branch of anthropology. Furthermore, it is proposed that much of the terminology and conceptual apparatus of memetics may be reconciled with that used by recent Continental philosophers in their studies of culture, thus suggesting a possible Darwinian framework for the re-unification of Western philosophy.
Key words
: meme, culture, evolution, Structuralism, philosophy, reductionism, anthropology, civilisation.

This essay was orginally published in the “Journal of Memetics – Evolutionary
Models of Information Transmission”
in 1997. It is freely accessible on
the web at: http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/1997/vol1/gatherer_dg.html

AuthorDerek Gatherer
2018-08-21T17:23:37+00:00 August 1st, 2002|Categories: Essays, Literature, Blesok no. 27|0 Comments