Pocklington, R. & M.L. Best (1997). Cultural Evolution and Units of Selection in Replicating Text. To appear Journal of Theoretical Biology.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles

....as Putative Meme We are looking for replicators within the corpus which are subject to natural selection. Elsewhere we have argued at length as to why the term subspace captures the requirements of a true meme because its word sets act as a unit of selection within the corpus (Best 1996, 1997; Pocklington Best 1997). The strengths of this term set as a replicating unit of selection are due to it meeting the following conditions: it is subject to replication by copying, it has strong copying fidelity, but not perfect fidelity, it is subject to mutation, r w i1 w i2 . w in , A r 1 r 2 ....

....for the post organism. In this way, the memes as represented in the memotype are subject to mutation. Finally, we have elsewhere shown there can be a strong covariance between the replicative success of a cluster or thread of posts and the degree to which they express certain term subspaces (Pocklington Best 1997). In other words, a group of posts can increase its volume of activity over time by increasing the degree to which it expresses certain term sets within its post s text. This, then, is a covariance between the fitness of a population of posts and the expression of a particular trait as defined ....

Pocklington, R. & M.L. Best (1997). Cultural Evolution and Units of Selection in Replicating Text. To appear Journal of Theoretical Biology.

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