Comments on: Remember Dan Dennett's ant? Even more zombie animals http://blog.ted.com/2008/10/23/remember_dan_de/ The TED Blog shares interesting news about TED, TEDTalks video, the TED Prize and more. Sat, 18 May 2013 17:23:08 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Mike Houghton http://blog.ted.com/2008/10/23/remember_dan_de/comment-page-1/#comment-987 Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000 http://blog-staging.ted.com/2008/10/remember_dan_de/#comment-987 Parasites that create zombie hosts are remarkable (and pretty frightening). The slideshow was amazing, but I was ultimately frustrated with Dan Dennett’s presentation. Perhaps it was that I kept wanting him to say “affect” instead of “infect” because of the distinction in value judgments between the two words. I think the question of which “memes” we might be willing to die for is a great one, and I’m thankful that as a species we’re willing to swim against evoluntionary logic from time to time by choosing for the benefit of others over ourselves. So how DO we separate the good memes from the bad memes? Is it really possible to be morally neutral? I don’t think so. And I guess I shouldn’t be bothered that he chose to use the non-neutral term “infect” either, except that he seemed to give the impression that he was speaking from a neutral position rather than in infected one.

- Infected Mike

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