While responding to the charge that memetics is useless because ideas are Lamarkian while genetics are Darwinian, DD makes a particularly pompous and defensive --- and shallow -- response (he makes it 25 minutes into part 2 of the audio version). To show how off target the critics are, he points out that with ideas there is no distinction between the germ line and the somatic line; nor is there a distinction between genotype and phenotype. That's supposed to show that memetics is quite unlamarkian. But this reply seems embarrassingly counter-productive. For Larmarkians, who were taken seriously prior to Mendel's discoveries, were in no need of such distinctions. Theirs was a holistic account. And in that way, it actually seems all the more appropo to look at memetics under a Lamarkian lens. And it is all the more inappropriate to compare the transmission of ideas to neo-Darwinian genetics.
How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...
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