> There's nothing special about biological organisms.
We disagree. Rocks don’t fight to survive. Weather doesn’t fight to survive. They just exist in an environment. The literal differentiator of biological organisms is that they fight to survive.
Memes as you define them also don’t fight to survive. They never go away (the world has more rage faces than ever and that sentence will be true to the end of time). They may become more or less popular, but there’s no extinction mechanism.
You're bringing arbitrary criteria that doesn't actually matter to the core question -- why does there need to be a possibility for complete extinction for memetic ideas to be comparable to natural evolution?
There's no "intention" involved or necessary. If you make more copies of yourself then there are more copies of you than there are of the thing that makes no copies of itself.
Viruses don't have intention, and they're not worried they might die out. Yet most viruses spread because the ones that don't spread are rare one-off occurrences, while the ones that do spread end up with billions of copies. The non-spreaders don't even have to die—they just exist in far, far fewer numbers than the ones that double every few minutes.
Viruses don't have intention (IDK what this has to do with anything), but they do compete because the risk of extinction. If there's no extinction mechanism then the weak organisms do not go away, everything just accumulates (like rocks). This is why you may have heard the term survival of the fittest.
Software is like rocks, it doesn't need to evolve to exist. We still have infinite copies of Windows BOB available, for example (literally the exact same amount as most other software).
We can make infinite copies of Windows BOB, but we haven't made as many copies as we have of more useful software. You don't have to delete it for there to be a selection pressure—you just have to copy it less. Extinction is not necessary, only a difference in propagation rates. You end up with more of what propagates more. I keep saying this and you keep ignoring it.
"Survival of the fittest" doesn't mean the guy who never has kids but lives to 120. It's the one who has ten kids before he dies. That's the lineage that ends up dominating the population.
Would you be surprised to learn that jpegs represent ideas and I’ve read the selfish gene?
> Rocks and weather don’t reproduce with some random error. Any system that does will evolve.
Rocks reproduce - it’s called sandstone (one rock decays into sand and another rock incorporates it into a new rock). Give me the way that’s different than biological reproduction.
It would surprise me to learn that, yes! Sure: biological systems contain meaningful information from many many many prior generations. Rocks don’t. Rocks are “wiped clean” of information every time they dissolve. Same with weather systems.
Of course there’s some highly chaotic cause-and-effect that impacts the processes, but the defining trait of a biological/replicating system is that they are resistant to this chaos. Not only does a dog from 5 generations ago still look like a dog (which requires way more internal order than looking like a rock), but you can see actual specific traits in common between a dog of 5 generations ago and all of its descendants.
In one system (rocks and weather), the only source of consistency is the highly chaotic way materials actually get mixed together. In other systems (biological), that same thing is the only source of inconsistency.
> Rocks are “wiped clean” of information every time they dissolve. Same with weather systems.
I won't go into why this isn't true (things are made of atoms and unless there's nuclear processes going on, those atoms stay the same).
But anyway, software evolves like rocks (even by your definition), not biological organisms - it can be changed each generation without defined constraints! It can revert changes that were made in previous generations! It can just sit around indefinitely and not change while still surviving! (IDK how to make this point more clear).
We disagree. Rocks don’t fight to survive. Weather doesn’t fight to survive. They just exist in an environment. The literal differentiator of biological organisms is that they fight to survive.
Memes as you define them also don’t fight to survive. They never go away (the world has more rage faces than ever and that sentence will be true to the end of time). They may become more or less popular, but there’s no extinction mechanism.