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To: shades who wrote (61698)	4/9/2005 6:39:37 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 74559

<It should not surprise us then that during the last ten thousand years, humans have almost not changed on the genetic level, whereas their culture (i.e. the total set of memes) has undergone the most radical developments.> Intelligence doesn't seem to be strongly linked to brain size in humans. Brain size hasn't changed much in 10,000 years. It seems likely that there has been very rapid development of intelligence over the past 10,000 years because the qualitative improvements have been nothing short of phenomenal. With the 6 billion now around, the meme development rate is also phenomenal. The quality of those memes is also dramatically improving. Sharpening a stone axe, inventing the wheel and sliced bread aren't in the same category as coming up with CDMA or nuclear fission. Maybe the smart genes nearly all existed 10,000 years ago, but the selection of them in preference to the lower intelligence humans of the time, combined with the dramatic increase in human numbers to 6 billion now from 100 million then means the change has been enormous. Throw in cyberspace and freedom from agrarian penury and it's time to get theological and teleological about what's going on. Mqurice

To: shades who wrote (61698)	4/9/2005 12:11:03 PM
From: smolejv@gmx.net	Respond to of 74559

To counter damnatio memoriae a little: the name of the "Czech student" was Jan Palach. And I don't think he would appreciate the idea of being used as an example of anything - and that would include memes for sure -. But, he's dead, so I guess this is no problem. btw, anything new of the meme / gene front since 1992? I know for sure things moved on the genes' side of the story, but for memes? After all the hoopla - which I went through myself too - memes look to me like a hard copy of preKopernbicus/geocentric astronomy: If everything you got in your hands is a Double Helix, everything starts to look like a gene.