Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin
It's not enough to count as proto-memetics to have an objective. There has to be a detailed plan for achieving that objective. If there was such a plan then after the dust settles you could evaluate how well the methods of that plan worked.
This would be science though perhaps with a lower-case "s". Or at least something like science. Historically any sort of detailed plan is rare and ones that survived contact with reality are rarer.
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That's a very 'blueprintish' way of looking at things. But things can work in 'recipeish' ways instead. In fact, genetics and organism development generally work more like a recipe than like a blueprint, and people engaged in prehistoric genetic modification had no detailed plan for achieving their objective, just like an organism development isn't written down as a step-by-step plan. And yet nowadays genetic modification uses much more scientific methods, sequencing genomes and engaging in molecular-level splicing/editing/etc. to produce the desired outcomes. Despite DNA being recipes, not plans nor blueprints.