evolution

I found a pretty amusing "email" to Richard Dawkins about his perceptions of the world: aetheism, memetics, evolution, etc. Check it out -- thanks to Fred Butler's Richard Dawkins' post box

In his book, Bully for Brontosaurus, scientific historian Stephen Jay Gould devotes a chapter to presenting Peter Kropotkin's views on biological evolution. Kropotkin is best known as a Russian revolutionary anarchist who believed in cooperative, rather than hierarchical and competitive, human relationships, and in devolving the power of the central state to local communities. It is less well known that his political views were based on a sophisticated view of evolution.

Basis for a Cooperative Economy in Russia
By Ronald Logan

Terence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake & Ralph Abraham discuss the evolutionary mind and what is responsible for the great leaps of consciousness that are taking place now and in the past. They discuss whether an extraterrestrial intervention, psychedelic catalyst, or morphogenetic resonance is responsible the sudden appearance of a larger neo-cortex in human beings about 50,000 years ago.

Richard Dawkins introduced the term after writing that evolution depended not on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmission — in the case of biological evolution, the gene. For Dawkins, the meme exemplifies another self-replicating unit, and most importantly, one which he thought would prove useful in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.

Evolution requires not only inheritance and natural selection but also
variation, and memes also exhibit this property. Ideas may undergo
changes in transmission which accumulate over time. Generations of
hosts pass on these changes in the “phenotype” (the information in
brains or in retention systems). In other words, unlike genetic
evolution, memetic evolution can show both Darwinian and Lamarckian
traits. For example, folk tales and myths often become embellished in
the retelling to make them more memorable or more appropriate and