Yes, this is what is at stake in Dawkins' concept of
the meme...and behavioral geneticists further
establish the ambiguity between the two, genetic code
and ideas. Genetic correlations have been found in
behavior exhibiting ranging extremes of religiosity,
conservatism, authoritarianism, harm avoidance,
control, aggression and alienation...for more on this,
see:
Lisabeth F. DiLalla, Behavior Genetics Principles:
Perspectives in Development, Personality and
Psychopathology (2004)...in particular, pp.73-104
Nick
--- Judith Roof <roof12@comcast.net> wrote:
What Jim suggests here is interesting in that all
language may not be
representation (and representation is not only
language). But
implicit here is the possibility of a different way
of thinking about
the kinds of elements that might operate in the
scale of the
biological (neither "natural" nor necessarily
material) as well as
the ways they might operate. If computers can
evacuate language so
that it no longer functions as a mode of
miscommunication (in the
sense that language conveys both more and less than
whatever it could
"mean"), and if chemicals can connote (i.e., mean
more than they do
or inflect that meaning into other processes), then
our notion of
what biology might consist of could be radically
enlarged to include
both the operations of computer language and the
excesses and
approximations of other sign systems. In the same
way that theories
of information have enlarged conceptions of the
material, so
detaching concepts of language and code from the
field of the
signified potentially expands the operational value
of language (of
any kind) as a biological factor--and not just an
effect of
biological processes.
i think.
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