I like how in the book "moral minds" Marc Hauser speaks about the idea
that social or moral norms are more like settings on a thermostat, the
is a range of parameters which these idea germs can be structured as
else they "feel" funny like an ungrammatical word sentence.
...we are endowed with a moral faculty that delivers judgments of
right and wrong based on unconsciously operative and inaccessible
principles of action. The theory posits a universal moral grammar,
built into the brains of all humans. The grammar is a set of
principles that operate on the basis of the causes and consequences of
action. Thus, in the same way that we are endowed with a language
faculty that consists of a universal toolkit for building possible
languages, we are also endowed with a moral faculty that consists of a
universal toolkit for building possible moral systems.
http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/11/marc-hauser-mor.html
Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal
Sense of Right and Wrong - by Marc Hauser
http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Minds-Nature-Designed-Universal/dp/0060780703
There is a book out about memes that looks like it addresses the
spread of ideas, memes, but is not trapped in the "tabula rasa" mode,
like researchers in memes have been in the past;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_rasa
"...memes are electric. They live and die in an individual's brain as
arrangements of electrical potentials. They are real creatures, at
least as substantial as computer viruses, evolving with unreal
rapidity in their neocortical substrate. They are not "ideas". The
most you could say of them is that they are the building blocks of
thought."
http://ephilosopher.com/article214.html
Let us theorize on the nature of this so-called "thought gene" and
what would be needed for one. Robert Aunger coins a term of his own,
"neuromemetics," proposing that memes are in fact self-replicating
electrical charges in the nodes of our brains. The author explains
that the shift in perspective from Dawkins's purely social memetics to
a memetics working at the intercellular level is akin to
sociobiology's view of social behavior as a genetic trait subject to
evolution.
Robert Aunger outlines what a meme physically is, how memes
originated, how they developed, and how they have made our brains into
their survival systems. They are thoughts. They are parasites. They
are in control. A meme is a distinct pattern of electrical charges in
a node in our brains that reproduces a thousand times faster than a
bacterium. Memes have found ways to leap from one brain to another. A
number of them are being replicated in your brain as you read this
paragraph.
In 1976 the biologist Richard Dawkins suggested that all animals --
including humans -- are puppets and that genes hold the strings. That
is, we are robots serving as life support for the genes that control
us. And all they want to do is replicate themselves. But then, we do
lots of things that don't seem to help genes replicate. We decide not
to have children, we waste our time doing dangerous things like
mountain climbing, or boring things like reading, or stupid things
like smoking that don't seem to help genes get copied into the next
generation. We do all sorts of cultural things for reasons that don't
seem to have anything to do with genes. Fashions in sports, books,
clothes, ideas, politics, lifestyles come and go and give our lives
meaning, so how can we be gene robots?
Dawkins recognized that something else was going on. We communicate
with one another and we get ideas, and these ideas seem to have a life
of their own. Maybe there was something called memes that were like
thought genes. Maybe our bodies were gene robots and our minds were
meme robots. That would mean that what we think is not the result of
our own creativity, but rather the result of the evolutionary flow of
memes as they wash through us.
What is the biological reality of an idea with a life of its own? What
is a thought gene? It's a meme. And no one before Robert Aunger has
established what it physically must be. This elegant, paradigm-
shifting analysis identifies how memes replicate in our brains, how
they evolved, and how they use artifacts like books and photographs
and advertisements to get from one brain to another. Destined to
inflame arguments about free will, open doors to new ways of sharing
our thoughts, and provide a revolutionary explanation of
consciousness, The Electric Meme will change the way each of us thinks
about our minds, our cultures, and our daily choices.
The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think
by Robert Aunger
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743201507/qid=1108237374/
http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~rva20/EMemeReviews.html
