Send us a letter . In 'The Internet in Your Hands,' Fiona Harvey observes that Nokia's conceptual phone could 'perform a plenitude of tasks' to support the daily activities of our world society. Problem solving seems to be closer to the core of what was needed for early hominid hunters to survive. Hunters benefit from language and auditory skills as well as depth perception and the ability to abstract. It could be that the capacities for music, art and philosophy are just secondary frills of the brain complexity needed for higher problem solving.
Human creativity is far more subtle and resistant to reductionism.
Contrary to memetics, human evolutionary advantage and sexual attractiveness should go not to the best imitators but rather to individuals who can best create, understand or selectively employ the most useful memes in crucial situations. But this commonsense view is turned inside out by memetic thinking, which treats human creativity as an evolutionary process that depends on human imitation for its copying mechanism. I agree that we would do well to study the copying step and the selection step separately, for both are complex and poorly understood. Berger reiterates the usual biologically based argument. Ehrlich has been famously wrong throughout his entire career yet remains virtually unscathed.