No Smoke without Fire November 7, 2004
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Memetics , trackbackI’ve added a new category, “Memetics” because this is a subject which has interested me ever since reading Richard Dawkins‘ books and I want to investigate it further.
I’ve identified the well known popular saying “There’s no smoke without fire” as a kind of Meta-meme. This is like the Aids virus of the meme world, it goes for the immune system and that then makes it easier for countless other memes to get a hold.
What makes it so sticky?
Sticky ideas are ones which some people believe, embrace and pass on, not because they are are intrinsically true or useful, but because they posess a quality which has been dubbed “stickiness”. I would love to be able to identify and define stickiness, but it’s not at all easy for a beginner, so for now I shall leave it as a meaningful tautology. Stickiness is the quality belonging to that which sticks!
‘No smoke without fire’ is attractive because it seems to give you permission to justify spreading a rumour without any proof. The fact that an idea is spreading is supposed to imply that there must be some truth in it. This provides excellent camouflage for ‘wrong ideas which spread’ - bad memes.
The Selfish Gene Dawkins 1989, only £7.19 at amazon.co.uk
Wikipedia entry for Richard Dawkins : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins
Read chapter 11 of The Selfish Gene online here:-
Memes, the new replicators
( the text that began the new science of MEMETICS, and where Dawkins coined the term `meme’).
2 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
is an online professional who initiated DARnet 
Dawkins is guilty of reductionism, he see’s humans simply as ‘carriers’ where genes compete and replicate.
Mememetics is guilty of the same. The branch of science stinks of idealism.
Read ‘lifelines’, steven rose.
http://human-nature.com/books/lifelines.html
The Selfish Gene came in for a lot of criticism from all sides, but largely from people who took the word “Selfish” in an emotive way rather than as the metaphor which Dawkins intended, in order to help illustrate the incredible power of Darwininan evolution to create richly complex entities out of relatively simple processes.
Is reductionism a sin to be guilty of, or merely a useful shorthand tool for beginning to understand complex processes? Dawkins has isolated the fundamental aspects of darwinian evolution as a force, and then asked if it is useful to expose the same force acting on other levels and in other domains, with considerable sucess in my opinion.
It puzzles me that Evan smells idealism whereas I read Dawkins as a crusader for materialism, so I have furled the link offered and will research further. ( I like the bit about 5 ways to look at a frog