---- David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com> wrote:
> One of the main objections to memes is that they are an entirely speculative
> construct, and there doesn't seem to be any way to test for whether they
> actually exist. Genes were speculative too at some point, of course, but
> the concept was testable and was borne out when the technology was able to
> confirm their makeup and structure. This is not true for memes.
It's true that the existence of genes has been confirmed fairly directly with the visual observation of chromosomes & then all the data we have no on DNA & heredity. It's also worth nothing though that even before this happened the statistical evidence that Mendel & others obtained for the transmission of simple Mendelian traits strongly supported the idea that there were genes (or "factors" as I think Mendel called them.) & AFAIK there is no such evidence for memes - i.e., no definite statitical predictions about the ways in which cultural traits will eb transmitted
Shalom,
George
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Received on Mon Jan 12 14:26:11 2009
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Mon Jan 12 2009 - 14:26:11 EST