Talk:The Major Transitions in Evolution

What is the purpose of this article? Shouldn't the information should be incorporated into the article on RNA world hypothesis ?

Untitled

and then this article deleted? DGG 23:29, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Why is there a link to a linguistics page? Perhaps a more scientific or descriptive term should be used to replace "universal grammar". Is this in reference to the genetic code? Mechanisms of gene regulation? Histone and/or DNA modification? The phrase is not widespread. It is ambiguous.

memes

Universal grammer is related to memes. It, and other social or intellectual breakthroughs, are postulated to be carried by memes. Memes is used here as used by the authors--this article is about their book. I do not know if most biologists consider meme a useful concept. I personally do not. I apologize for my edit to this page of 26 Sept. I did not at the time realize that this article was about a specific book. DGG 04:39, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

RE: memes and the 'dubious - discuss' section

I deleted this remark because it does not seem warranted from the article cited. Smith and Szathmary devote a page specifically to memes in their new book "The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origins of Language" (look it up in Google Books) and seem to heartily embrace the idea of culture replicating almost like genes (though they say it's phenotype, not genotype, that replicates directly). In Major Transitions the idea of memes is mentioned on p. 292, and not critically: "New words and phrases are memes, able to spread rapidly even if they are not, at first, understood."

The article this person cited says:

My uneasiness with the notion of memes arises because we do not know the rules whereby they are transmitted. A science of population genetics is possible because the laws of transmission—Mendel's laws—are known. Dennett would agree that no comparable science of memetics is as yet possible. His point is a philosophical rather than a scientific one. We see humans as the joint products of their genes and their memes—indeed, what else could they possibly be?—even if we have no predictive science of meme change. Once a human mind capable of harboring memes evolved, a new kind of evolution, cultural evolution, became possible, more rapid by far than genetic evolution.

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Seems the idea of memes is pretty important to him, whether we know exactly how they're transmitted or not. auriam (talk) 02:26, 8 December 2009 (UTC)