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Pay attention to the other posters in the thread who have real life experience. Learn from them. Don't argue out your ass about things on which you have no clue. :-)

From http://pespmc1.vib.ac.be/PETERPR.html:

'[...] in a hierarchically structured administration, people tend to be promoted up to their "level of incompetence".'

After you've read that, I suggest you rearrange your prejudices awhile. :-)

there's a major problem there: the assumption that there's a reasonably straightforward mapping from gene to meme. but i think that current assumptions are probably highly simplistic, and in fact, perhaps in general the mapping is not discoverable.

not so long ago, i read most of a book by Stuart Kauffman called "At home in the universe: the search for the laws of self-organisation & complexity". It became a little less solid towards the end, but the early chapters contained what was, to me, a brilliantly illuminating discussion of the way that networks of genes function.

kauffman argues that the expression of a genome is not just just the simple reading of segments of the DNA which encode proteins which go away and build things, but that a set of genes really forms a boolean network, where the action of some gene can affect the expression of another gene, and vice versa.

what that means in computery terms is that the way your genes work is less like a shopping list (gene A implies obesity, gene B implies intelligence, etc), and more like a cellular automata. if you remember some of your computer theory, you might remember that many simple CA's (e.g. Conway's Life) are Turing complete.

so what we have is essentially an evolved computer program. and if you think that some people write bizarre code, wait till you've seen some that's generated by genetic algorithm. then multiply that by billions of year's worth of evolution, raise to the power of the Halting Problem, and that's the order of the difficulty of decoding the genome!

by way of illustration of the sort of complexity that can arise when even simple systems are evolved in the real world, check out Adrian Thompson's web page. In particular, this paper has a fascinating analysis of the properties of some genetically evolved FPGA hardware. now this stuff is really simple - we're talking digital components, 100 gates, evolved to perform a simple discrimination process.

the circuit worked, but they didn't really have the faintest clue of how! because it evolved, it pushed the physics of the FPGA as far as they would go. to quote from the paper:

There are numerous tactics that can be used to piece-together answers to analysis questions even for seemingly impenetrably circuits. We applied many of those techniques to the most advanced unconventional circuit yet produced. We still do not understand fully how it works: the core of the timing mechanism is a subtle property of the VLSI medium. We have ruled out most possibilities: circuit activity (including glitch-transients and beat frequencies), metastability, and thermal time-constants from self-heating. Whatever this small effect, we understand that it is amplified by alterations in bistable and transient dynamics of oscillatory loops, and in detail how this is used to derive an orderly near-optimal output. Certain peripheral cells fine-tune particularly sensitive time delays.

that's why i argue for caution in the use of genetic engineering technology. actually, i'm not sure i do. nature has thrown so many genes together for so long that i doubt we can come up with much that does anything really useful that isn't just a simple isolated gene-to-attribute mapping.

the claims that are made for genetic engineering are way overblown - genes might be the roadmap for life, but i bet they'll be an almost completely unreadable one.

http://tinf2.vub.a c.be/~dvermeir/manuals/autotools/tutorial.html

These may help ya out a bit, the first is just formal documentation on automake and the second is a nice url that I've used a few times going through a few different GNU development tools.

There will always be somebody trying to screw us. We should always do whatever we can to screw others before they screw us.

Well, this is yet another incidence of the prisoners dilemma isn't it. (For those who aren't familiar with this, its explained here )

The most succesful solution to the iterated version has been shown to be tit-for-tat. i.e cooperate first, and then if you lose, do what the other player did last time. So if a country can agree with its allies that they shouldn't spy on each other, and they can each prove that they aren't, both countries win. The worst case is that the one that cooperated will be disadvantaged once. Unfortunately the stakes are a lot higher in this case, and nobody wants to risk losing the first time.

It is easier to understand the proliferation of messages that communicate ideas that are contrary to the intent of their proliferators (in other words, people think they're spreading legitimate information but in fact are talking crap) if you see these communications as the result of natural selection rather than conscious creation.

It's the same principle that has allowed us to make much more sense out of the natural world by trying to understand it as the product of evolution, rather than trying to interpret it as the residue of God's Plan.

The creation of phbs is a natural social process, it's called The Peter Principle

It basically says that people get promoted until they can't perform the job anymore. then they stay there.

There's also the way people are hired. Most people hire you because they like you (or can tolerate you), and you can basically do the job. Being likeable is a different skill than being capable, but it gets rewarded very often in life.

The best site I have found discussing memes is at the Principia Cybernetica. It is well researched and well-linked.

As far as this book is concerned, it sounds like yet another psychologist coming up with a theory to end all theories, at least as far as human psychology is concerned. Freud, Adler, Jung, and Chomsky all have made the same mistake, namely the belief that their particular theory can explain all human behavior. The author of this book apparently does the same thing. While it might be interesting, that does not mean it is a complete theory.

I have not read the book, so someone correct me if I'm wrong.

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RAK