"Dan Bolser"  wrote in message
>
> you mean 'so there must be some types out there' ?
>
People are psychologically different. Tony Blair is a very different person
to George W. Bush, despite the fact that both are heads of state.
The problem is, how can you quantify these differences?
>
> > Only if they show Mendelian inheritance, which isn't likely.
>
> Hmmm.... I warn my young child about the dangers of the world - he > grows
up conservative... does that count?
>
You'd have to have four children, one of whom grew up conservative, one
liberal, and two middle of the road.
>
> I am not really talking about memes, but rather memetic organisms -
> whole sets of self reinforcing stable ideas - like, for example, (*fingers
> crossed*) religion.
>
This leads us to the question of "what is a meme". It's a unit of imitable
behaviour, and it must have some sort of physical substrate, but we don't
know what it is. i.e. all people who say "can't hardly" must have something
in common in their brains, but what is that something?
>
> In this sense taking one memetic organism and transplanting it into a
> different culture could be disasterous.
>
Protestantism couldn't survive in a non-literate culture, for example. The
meme for "sola scriptura" is quite closely tied to the meme for reading.
>
> Yup, and I am sure psychology is a much faster moving target than
> 'species'. You tell me I have a mother fixation - I learn this and change
> - I become neurotic, and use pop-freud to diagnose myself... Tons of
> changing categories. However, the very first taxonomists
> (morphologists?) were cluless... perhaps we can develope a system in >
time.
>
> Interesting concept, but perhaps ultimatly usless.
>
The point is that simply sitting down and saying "well I call my
"A" type
very ambitious, competive people, and my "B" type people who are aggressive
but not necessarily intelligent or ambitious" etc just lands you in the
company of Tarot card readers, astrologers, and other assorted
pseudo-scientists. There has to be more substance to any scheme of
classification.
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