A.J. Marr has written an excellent essay on the notion of the meme and why he believes it to be essentially a poor metaphor for the complexities of human behavior. It is well-researched and thoughtful, but in the end, relegates the concept of the meme to the land of mixed metaphors and gives it too much credit of control over human behavior. Read more…

Darwinian explanations for the phenomena of life and our own existence have a way seeping into every facet of our body of knowledge about the world around us, a dissolution that Daniel Dennett liked to describe as a universal acid (Dennett 1995). A universal acid would dissolve any substance and therefore nothing would be able to contain it. In this fashion, Darwinian explanations that describe our locomotion and origins have also begun to account for our nature and our behavior. Some have attempted to stop the seepage of this acid into explanations for our behavior by claiming that the mechanisms by which evolution created our physical form and function and even some of our behavior—in particular—have no ability to generate our capacity for altruistism; our capacity to give to one another without regard for self-interest. However, altruism is only protected from the acid of the Darwinian explanation if the mechanisms of evolution are modeled incorrectly or if the interests of genes are mistaken as synonymous with the interests of an organism. This attempt to use altruism to stave off the acid of a Darwinian explanation for altruism in human behavior will not succeed. Read more…

In his 1991 work “Consciousness Explained” Daniel Dennett discusses Richard Dawkins’ idea of the idea replicator (the meme [google dfn.]). He provides a list of what he would consider memes but eliminates certain basic concepts from the list, leading to the question: Where does the meme begin? Read more…

[Amazon link: "On Intelligence"] I have to say first that I bought this book with a great deal of skepticism. I found it highly unlikely that a product designer would have anything other than hyperbole and over-generalizations (i.e. Malcolm Gladwell, the “Tipping Point” or “Blink”) regarding something as complex as machine intelligence or the human brain. Boy was I wrong. After reading Hawkin’s introduction and discovering that he was and is far more than a product designer I began to relax my initial resistance to the book. Read more…