Word: darwinian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...made, with occasional errors, and with some influence or power over their own probability of replication. Perhaps we'd have to go to other planets to discover any other examples. But maybe we didn't have to go that far. Could it be that a new kind of Darwinian replicator was even now staring us in the face? This was where the meme came...
When the meme began, in The Selfish Gene in 1976, the message was a negative one: genes aren't the only pebbles on the Darwinian beach. In 1998, in Unweaving the Rainbow, I could be more positive: "There is an ecology of memes, a tropical rainforest of memes, a termite mound of memes. Memes don't only leap from mind to mind by imitation, in culture. That is just the easily visible tip of the iceberg. They also thrive, multiply and compete within our minds. When we announce to the world a good idea, who knows what subconscious quasi-Darwinian...
Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who has long battled what he calls "Darwinian fundamentalism," dismisses the meme as a "meaningless metaphor." H. Allen Orr, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Rochester, isn't much nicer. "I think memetics is an utterly silly idea," he complains. "It's just cocktail-party science...
What happened along the way? We picked a concentration, chose a blocking group, got randomized, camped, punched and winnowed our way through activities and people. What we are now is, to some degree, the culmination of an extensive process of refinement and specialization; the Darwinian forces of our environment have forced us to adapt, grow elaborate plumage or camouflage, and develop idiosyncrasies or talents we wouldn't have imagined possessing when we first arrived...
...didn't work. Today the new, improved version of human sociobiology--evolutionary psychology--is flourishing. Such scholars as Leda Cosmides, John Tooby and Steven Pinker (author of How the Mind Works) have begun to explain human language, logic and perception in Darwinian terms...