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Dictionary Definition

meme n : a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one generation to another by nongenetic means (as by imitation); "memes are the cultrual counterpart of genes"

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English

Etymology

Coined by Richard Dawkins, 1976 in the book, The Selfish Gene. Modelled after gene, possibly influenced by mimic and memory or from μίμημα (imitation, copy).

Pronunciation

Noun

  1. Any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity.
  2. A self-propagating unit of cultural evolution having a resemblance to the gene (the unit of genetics).

Derived terms

See also

Translations

unit of cultural information
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self-propagating unit of cultural evolution
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Extensive Definition

A meme (pronounced /miːm/) consists of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a "culture" in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus. As a unit of cultural evolution, a meme in some ways resembles a gene. Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene, recounts how and why he coined the term meme to describe how one might extend Darwinian principles to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. He gave as examples tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothing-fashions, and the technology of building arches.
Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (similarly to Darwinian biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success. So with memes, some ideas will propagate less successfully and become extinct, while others will survive, spread, and, for better or for worse, mutate. "Memeticists argue that the memes most beneficial to their hosts will not necessarily survive; rather, those memes that replicate the most effectively spread best, which allows for the possibility that successful memes may prove detrimental to their hosts."

Origins and concepts

The word meme first came into popular use with the publication of Dawkins's book The Selfish Gene in 1976. Dawkins based the word on a shortening of the Greek "mimeme" (something imitated), making it sound similar to "gene". Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator. He hypothesised that people could view many cultural entities as replicators, generally replicating through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient (though not perfect) copiers of information and behaviour. Memes do not always get copied perfectly, and might indeed become refined, combined or otherwise modified with other ideas, resulting in new memes. These memes may themselves prove more (or less) efficient replicators than their predecessors, thus providing a framework for a hypothesis of cultural evolution, analogous to the theory of biological evolution based on genes.
Dawkins defined the meme as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation", but memeticists in general promote varying definitions of the concept of the meme. The lack of a consistent, rigorous and precise understanding of what typically makes up one unit of cultural transmission remains a problem in debates about memetics.

Etymology

Historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from Greek mneme, meaning "memory"), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the German evolutionary biologist Richard Semon titled Die Mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen (loosely translated as "Memory-feelings in relation to original feelings"). According to the OED, the word mneme appears in English in 1921 in L. Simon's translation of Semon's book: The Mneme.
According to Dawkins, who coined the word "meme" without knowing about mnemes, meme represents a shortened form of mimeme (from Greek mimos, "mimic"). Dawkins said he wanted "a monosyllable word that sounds a bit like gene".

Dawkins' genetic analogy

Richard Dawkins introduced the term after writing that evolution depended not on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmission — in the case of biological evolution, the gene. For Dawkins, the meme exemplifies another self-replicating unit, and most importantly, one which he thought might prove useful in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.
Dawkins himself, in a speech on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Selfish Gene, described his motivation for postulating memes: he portrayed the idea not so much as an attempt at creating an account for cultural complexity, but rather as seeking something with which the selfish-genetic mechanism would still work with unreliable replicators:

Examples of memes

Common memes include:
The Memetic Lexicon lists meme-attributes compiled by Glenn Grant under a "share-alike" licence. The examples it offers may help to focus the concept. The Lexicon has circulated since the early 1990s, and evolved into its version 3.5 of its memeplex (Memelex) in 2004: A Memetic Lexicon. One should keep in mind that Glenn Grant has the background of a writer of fiction rather that of an authority on memetics: many of the terms in the lexicon he simply invented as an experiment in the spread of his own self-generated memes. http://www.istop.com/~ggrant/memes.html

Transmission of memes

Life-forms transmit information vertically (from generation to generation) via replication of genes. Memes can also transmit information vertically by replication. Memes also spread from hosts horizontally within a generation. They may also lie dormant for long periods of time: Copernicus re-discovered the ancient heliocentric views of Aristarchus.
Memes spread by the behaviors that they generate in their hosts. For example, the fashion-value that "less is more" spreads through the behavior of people dressing down in understated clothes and acting superior. This behavior then has the effect of showing others a real-life example of this fashion-value. Verbal transmission can supplement or replace this imitative method.
Those interested in tracking how memes spread through culture may use memetrackers, websites that allow one to see how people receive, use, and spread new information on the Web. Cameron Marlowe's Blogdex project pioneered research on this topic.

Memes as discrete units

Although memeticists speak of memes as discrete units, this need not imply that thoughts somehow become quantized or that "atomic" ideas exist which one cannot break down into smaller pieces. The meme as a unit simply provides a convenient way of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless of whether that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme. A meme could consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech in which that word was first uttered. This forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a self-replicating set of code. In 1981 biologists Charles J. Lumsden and Edward Osborne Wilson published a theory of gene/culture co-evolution in the book Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process. They argued that the fundamental biological units of culture must correspond to neuronal networks that function as nodes of semantic memory. Wilson later adopted the term meme as the best existing name for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance and elaborated upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences in his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

Meme-like concepts before Dawkins

Plato used the term eidos to speak of the immutable and eternal nature of an existing thing. The human mind acted upon this eidos, according to Plato, when reasoning about the world around it. Aristotle rejected this notion in favor of an abstraction and categorization of the world as perceived by the observer.
Descriptions of meme-like concepts appear in Sufi teaching. Muwakkals rank as separate beings, elementals, that make up human thought (compare Leibniz's monads). These "elemental thoughts" also appear in the Vajrayana tradition as thoughtform simulacrum.
During the Enlightenment the terms "idea", "perception", and "impression" came into use. The essential meaning of the term "idea", as then used, involved some existent phenomena resulting from perception of a stimulus and cogitation on that stimulus.
Charles Darwin struggled with the concept in his early notebooks (M and N Notebooks) and never succeeded in adequately addressing the complexities of the human social and cognitive capabilities. While Darwin lacked proof for a biologically-inheritable element, he had postulated one and seemed quite comfortable with the concept of biologically-inherited social traits. (A modern biologist ignorant of the connotations of the term might characterize the latter concept as "Social Darwinism".) Darwin also wrote of selection of novelty and fashion and quoted Max Müller on the struggle amongst words and grammatical forms:
Gabriel Tarde (1843 - 1904), a French sociologist, developed ideas of cultural transmission based on imitation and innovation of small psychological interactions. His sociology attempted to classify social phenomena by the generation and propagation of ideas, practices, and habits. Some have seen this work as an appealing historical and theoretical precursor to memetics.
Bertrand Russell repeated several times the phrase "beliefs are contagious" in his writing about human error.
John Laurent in The Journal of Memetics has suggested that the term 'meme' itself may have derived from the work of the little-known German biologist Richard Semon. In 1904 Semon published Die Mneme (published in English as The Mneme in 1924). His book discussed the cultural transmission of experiences with insights parallel to those of Dawkins. Laurent found the use of the term mneme in The Soul of the White Ant (1927) by Maurice Maeterlinck (who allegedly plagiarised from Eugène N. Marais) and highlights its parallels to Dawkins's concept.
The old saying "Ideas have a life of their own" clearly encapsulates the "meme about memes". Keith Henson has traced this quote back to 1910 where an unknown interviewer of G. K. Chesterton used it - apparently as an old saying at that time.http://groups.google.ca/group/alt.quotations/msg/679859a365f8ad0d?hl=en&
One could conceivably trace this idea back to at least 1831, when Victor Hugo wrote: "[...] every thought, either philosophical or religious, is interested in perpetuating itself [...]" in his book Notre Dame de Paris (translated into English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame) (Book Fifth, Chapter II).
John Maynard Keynes ended his The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1935) with the following:
Everett Rogers pioneered the "Diffusion of innovations" theory (formalised in 1962) which explains how and why people adopt new ideas. Rogers reflected some of the influence of Gabriel Tarde (1843 - 1904), who set out "laws of imitation" in his book of 1890 that explained how people decided whether to imitate behavior.
The concept that ideas spread according to genetic rules predates the coining by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene; for example William S. Burroughs asserted that "language is a virus".

Memeplexes

Much of the study of memes focuses on groups of memes called memeplexes (also known as meme complexes or as memecomplexes) — such as religious, cultural, or political doctrines and systems. Memeplexes contain mutually supportive memes that together become more evolutionarily successful. These memeplexes may also play a part in the acceptance of new memes which, if they fit with a memeplex, can "piggyback" on that success. Memeplexes of religion provide a commonly-cited example. Without some concept of cultural evolution, one might have to postulate repeated and contradictory divine/demonic revelations in order to account for the historical record of religions and for the existence of various and varied denominations.

Memetics

Memetics originated when Richard Dawkins reduced the process of biological genetic evolution to its most fundamental unit: the replicator (or gene). Dawkins, in a search for parallels and other things that he might classify as replicators, suggested that the information and ideas in brains — culture, for example — could function as replicators as well. Computer software may represent another form of replicator with which evolution may eventually build grand things, whether socially as in the open source movement, or through the use of evolutionary algorithms.
Memetics offers maximum explanatory value in cases where one cannot demonstrate the truth of the contents of the meme. For example, one can readily show that washing hands helps to prevent illness, so the best explanation for the widespread popularity of this practice is that "it works", though memetics still helps explain the rate of spread, and details such as why the practice of washing hands before surgery took so long to catch on. Memetics, however, excels in explaining the spread of certain value-judgements ("chastity is important"), preferences ("pork is repulsive"), superstitions ("black cats bring bad luck") and other scientifically unverifiable beliefs ("'X' is the one true God"); since one cannot easily account for any of these phenomena by conventional scientific methods. Calling someone's ideas/beliefs/action a "meme", therefore, does not constitute an insult, but dismissing it as "just a meme" does. An atheist, for example, can regard both theism and atheism as memetic.

Memetic methodology

Memetics often takes concepts from the theory of evolution (especially population genetics) and applies them to human culture. Memetics also uses mathematical models to try to explain many very controversial subjects such as religion and political systems. Principal criticisms of memetics include the claim that memetics ignores established advances in the fields (such as sociology, cognitive psychology, social psychology, etc.) most relevant to the claims and methodologies of memetics.
Memeticists generate much memetic terminology by prepending 'mem(e)-' to an existing, usually biological, term or by putting 'mem(e)' in place of 'gen(e)' in various terms. Examples include: meme pool, memotype, memetic engineer, meme-complex.

Well-known memeticists

Susan Blackmore

Susan Blackmore theorized that a "self" merely comprises a collection of memetic stories which she calls the selfplex. Her textbook The Meme Machine, written in 2000 and published with a foreword by Richard Dawkins, broadly covers the field of consciousness studies. She served on the editorial board for the Journal of Memetics (an electronic journal) from 1997 to 2001, and has worked as a consulting editor of The Skeptical Inquirer since 1998.

Keith Henson

Keith Henson wrote two articles on memes in 1987, one published in Analog. The other, Memes, MetaMemes and Politics, circulated on the Internet prior to publication. Eric S. Raymond, a long-time friend of Henson's, saw one of the early drafts of a later paper on cults, memes and religion and has publicly credited it as an influence on the theory of peer-esteem rewards he developed to explain the open-source movement. In the second edition of his book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins approvingly cites Henson's coining of the neologism "memeoids" to refer to "victims who have been taken over by a meme to the extent that their own survival becomes inconsequential."

Some concepts of memetics

Doubts about memetics

In much the same way that the selfish gene concept offers a way of understanding and reasoning about aspects of biological evolution, the meme concept can conceivably assist in the better understanding of some otherwise puzzling aspects of human culture. However, if one cannot test for "better" empirically, the question will remain whether or not the meme concept counts as a valid scientific theory. Memetics thus remains a science in its infancy, a protoscience to proponents, or a pseudoscience to detractors.
Another objection to the study of the evolution of memes in genetic terms (although not to the existence of memes) involves the fact that the cumulative evolution of genes depends on biological selection-pressures neither too great nor too small in relation to mutation-rates. There seems no reason to think that the same balance will exist in the selection pressures on memes.
Some controversy has become associated with the word meme itself: partly because Richard Dawkins (a self-proclaimed atheist) champions critical thinking and publicly challenges irrational beliefs. He has appeared on television to expose as frauds psychics and mediums who charge fees for their services. As a personality, Dawkins appears to some as a crusader against faith-based belief systems, and many of those who come under his scrutiny come to criticize him and the concept of "memes". However, some doubters of memetics challenge the concept of "memes" on a scholastic level and divorce their criticism of memetics from an argumentum ad hominem criticism of Dawkins and his personal views. Examples of the varying degrees of criticism of memetics include the following:

Lack of philosophical appeal

One might regard the reduction of the highly complex nature of ideas (such as religion, politics, war, justice, and science itself) to a putatively one-dimensional series of memes as an abstraction and, as such, a process which does not increase one’s understanding. The highly interconnected, multi-layering of such ideas resists memetic simplification to an atomic or molecular form; as does the fact that each of our lives remains fully enmeshed and involved in such "memes". One cannot view memes through a microscope in the way one can detect genes. The levelling-off of all such interesting "memes" down to some neutralized molecular "substance" such as "meme-substance" would introduce a bias toward scientism and abandon the very thing that makes ideas interesting, richly available, and worth studying.
Another philosophical criticism sees memetics as re-introducing, or re-inforcing, the classic pre-20th-century form of Cartesian dualism, that of mind versus body. Memetics seeks to include in the overall science of evolution such a dualism in the form of meme/gene. This dualism remains tenable, but many prominent philosophers have criticised it widely and historians of philosophy often consider it on the wane. Wittgenstein, in his critique of Cartesian dualism, Philosophical Investigations, argued for the absurdity of positing two parallel worlds, one of "body stuff", the other of "mind stuff" whose interaction one does not (and perhaps can not) know. (See also Wittgenstein's private language argument).
However, in response to such criticism one might add that memeticists have started to see memes not as atomic but as complex interactors in an environment of other memes and physical entities, a development pre-figured perhaps in the theory of the association of ideas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries . However, such a response would require memetics to prove it had some value to add to such complexity in order to prevent it falling into the same disuse as the theory of association of ideas.
Memetics might counter the charge of dualism by noting Leibniz's monadology. This provided a direct response to Cartesian dualism based on an indivisible unit, the monad. Memes resemble monads in that they lack physicality (not having shape, size, mass, charge or energy) and yet as a totality they account for reality. Taken together they form the sum of all experience at any given time. But this argument essentially becomes a solipsistic exercise.
Against the charge of dualism, memeticists might counter that memes in fact supersede genetics, science itself then becoming just another meme that aims, not at the "Truth", as such, but at the useful. However, memetics would then have undermined its own truth and the history of its own arrival on the scene, thus becoming yet another ontotheology.

Three variations on the meaning of a meme

  1. The least controversial claim suggests that memes provide a useful philosophical perspective with which to examine cultural evolution. Proponents of this view argue that considering cultural developments from a meme's eye view — as if memes themselves acted (or through the actions of the people who carry them) to maximise their own replication and survival — can lead to useful insights and yield valuable predictions into how culture develops over time. Dawkins himself seems to have favoured this approach.
  2. Other theorists, such as Francis Heylighen, have focused on the need to provide an empirical grounding for memetics in order for people to regard it as a real and useful scientific discipline. Given the nebulous (and in many cases subjective) nature of many memes, providing such an empirical grounding has to date proved challenging. However, a study by Mikael Sandberg, further elaborates the memetic approach to empirical studies of innovation-diffusion in organisations.
  3. A third approach, exemplified by Dennett and by Susan Blackmore in her book The Meme Machine (1999), seeks to place memes at the centre of a radical and counter-intuitive naturalistic theory of mind and of personal identity. Evan Louis Sheehan uses the hierarchical model of cortical architecture proposed by Jeff Hawkins to develop such a memetic theory of mind in his book The Mocking Memes: A Basis for Automated Intelligence.
It has been suggested that doubters of the existence of the meme embrace an anti-memeite position and clearly define that position with a word and develop a community or culture around that word.
Some prominent researchers in evolutionary psychology and anthropology, including Scott Atran, Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer, John Tooby and others, argue the possibility of incompatibility between modularity of mind and memetics. On their view, minds structure certain communicable aspects of the ideas produced, and these communicable aspects generally trigger or elicit ideas in other minds through inference (to relatively rich structures generated from often low-fidelity input) and not high-fidelity replication or imitation. Atran discusses communication involving religious beliefs as a case in point. In one set of experiments, he asked religious people to write down on a piece of paper the meanings of the Ten Commandments. Despite the subjects' own expectations of consensus, interpretations of the commandments showed wide ranges of variation, with little evidence of consensus. In another experiment, normal subjects and autistic subjects interpreted ideological and religious sayings (for example, "Let a thousand flowers bloom" or "To everything there is a season"). Autistics showed a significant tendency to closely paraphrase and repeat content from the original statement (for example: "Don't cut flowers before they bloom"). Controls tended to infer a wider range of cultural meanings with little replicated content (for example: "Go with the flow" or "Everyone should have equal opportunity"). Only the autistic subjects — who lack inferential capacity normally associated with aspects of theory of mind — came close to functioning as "meme machines".
To see such an argument for holism as against the kind of atomic reductionism allegedly implied by memetics, see Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"
This central problem with the possibility of memes has an illustration in the inability of such a meme-reductionist proposal to afford an explanation of how memetics itself qualifies as a meme, or, further, how one could describe biological genetics as a rather successful meme current in 20th-century science. Either way memes fail. Providing such an explanation would remove the ground from which the idea of memes themselves arose and so empty memes of all meaning. Without such an explanation memes find themselves without reason, limited to cover all but science and memetics itself.

Lack of rigor

Genetics has a clear model explaining the storage and transmission of genes. Indeed, Richard Dawkins himself clearly discusses, in his book The Selfish Gene, how patterns of DNA directly generate patterns of proteins that then combine to construct biological phenotypes — the physical bodies of living things. Those phenotypes have the means for replicating their defining patterns into sex cells for transmitting the patterns to offspring. Memetics, by contrast, as of 2007 has no such commonly accepted model for the storage and transmission of memes. Memeticists typically assume that memetic "phenotypes" equate with memetic "genotypes" — that every individual believing in one god, for example, carries the same "monotheistic meme" — but do not propose a single well-defined mechanism by which memes are cognitively encoded or transmitted. This lack of rigor seems like a serious — and to critics, fatal — weakness in memetics relative to its genetic model. What are the "particulate" (physically-defined) patterns or entities that have the responsibility or ability to encode and transmit a meme?

General response to criticisms

In response to these criticisms, memeticists might argue that as their discipline does not construe memes as "particulate" entities, they therefore parallel indirectly the entirety of existing evolutionary taxonomy. (For example, one would not preclude fish from the animal kingdom for their lack of lungs.)
The author Evan Louis Sheehan, on the other hand, does attempt to rigorously portray the cognitive representations of memes as "particulate" entities. He defines them as patterns captured in cortical hierarchies, identical in structure to what Jeff Hawkins proposes in his book On Intelligence (2004). Each hierarchy expresses a complex pattern that the brain-owner has automatically sensed and remembered, as a consequence of simple Hebbian learning. "Sensed patterns" captured in these cortical hierarchies can reflect anything from the shape of a tree to a commonly-performed pattern of behavior that routinely propagates through mimicry. A cortical hierarchy consists of a "molecular" entity, constructed from sub-hierarchies (as the pattern of a tree comprises the sub-patterns of leaves, branches and a trunk), which themselves ultimately comprise "atomic" entities — small, patterned combinations of sensory elements. Memes thus take on a "particulate" nature that allows their combination and re-combination in various ways. Sheehan, in his book The Mocking Memes: A Basis for Automated Intelligence builds a model of creative thinking around a rapidly-evolving Darwinian process of combining and re-combining various causal memes, which represent nothing more than remembered patterns of causality.
Sheehan describes a meme as any sort of pattern that serves as a template for its own replication. He suggests that an understanding of memetics requires a recognition of how such patterns get themselves automatically translated — according to the strict laws of physics — from substrate to substrate, as from patterns of light entering a human eye to patterns of neural excitations in the retina of that eye, to the Hebbian development of hierarchical patterns of neural connections in the cortex, and ultimately to patterns of muscle contractions that serve to mimic the witnessed behaviors of others.
Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, in a debate with theologian Alister McGrath, has responded to criticism regarding the lack of rigor in the study of memetics by claiming that words and similar means of spreading and holding ideas provide a clear model for the spread and storage of memes. Sheehan suggests the automatic translation of patterns among various substrates as critical to providing the means for spreading and holding patterns of words and ideas. For example, we speak words through vibrational patterns of the larynx, which get translated to pressure waves in air, which then get translated to vibrations of a listener's ear drum, which then get translated to waves of cochlear fluid inside the inner ear, which then get translated to patterns of neural firings, which then get translated to patterns of neural connections, thereby establishing a memory of the spoken words in the listener's mind. Sheehan asserts that the constant flitting of memetic patterns from one substrate to another makes memes so difficult to pin down, as analogous to genes, but that the physical processes that translate memetic patterns from substrate to substrate exhibit an usually high level of fidelity.
According to Sheehan, "automatic translations of patterns from substrate to substrate to substrate, and back again, provide looping pathways by which patterns can iteratively replicate, mutate and evolve." Sheehan claims that "many such looping pathways exist both within a single brain (to create an intelligent mind) and among many brains (to create culture, language and technology)."
Others suggest that many of the criticisms of memetic theory stem from confusion over what the term "gene" refers to. In microbiology, microbiologists see a "gene" as a cistron, a specific region of DNA. The analogy between memes and genes, however, relates to an evolutionary biologist's gene, an abstract replicatory unit of information. People who think of a gene as an actual visible piece of DNA often criticise the memetic analogy because of this. An example of such an "abstract replicatory unit of information" might code for the color of one's hair or for the length of a digit.

Memetic accounts of religion

Memetics regards religion itself as memetic, and Richard Dawkins has often discussed religion.
Evangelistic religious movements act to swell the reach of their faith-meme. Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Mormonism (and their descendants) have all developed through variation, modification and memetic re-combination from a shared monotheistic meme: Zoroastrianism appears to have functioned as an important and widely-shared religious ancestor, contributing through Judaism to Christianity, Islam and their many derivative religions. Some of these movements devote a large amount of time and energy to evangelistic activity.
Many of the world's most successful religions demonstrate memetic modification over time — the theologies of the 21st century differ to a greater or lesser extent from the theologies of previous centuries.
In Western countries, universities evolved from medieval religious institutions devoted to learning. Of the nine colonial colleges in the British colonies of North America, eight had affiliations with religious institutions. Many US colleges separated themselves from their seminaries, because the First Amendment to the United States Constitution prevents federal funding of religious organizations. One can think of American academia as an offshoot religion that eliminated less adaptive memes (beliefs in the supernatural) in response to a selective pressure (funding restrictions).
A tendency exists in memetics to disparage religious memes, beginning at least as early as Dawkins's openly-expressed atheism. Dawkins in The God Delusion (2006) calls all religious memes "mind viruses". Some compare this process to a scenario where the action of a virus (here a religion or a "bundle" of religious memes) proves ineffective and maladaptive if it kills its host(s), or to where the presence of less-harmful bacteria on the skin prevent infection by more-harmful organisms. For example, popular Christianity forbids both murder and suicide, and its precise definitions of heresy ensure that properly-educated Christians have difficulty in accepting new religions or new viewpoints which advocate such actions.
Susan Blackmore has made a case that the study of Zen meditation in itself comprises a process of meme "pruning", i.e., a means to remove experiential clichés that reduce the value of life. This has not exempted Zen itself from serving as a source of highly mobile memes, such as "the sound of one hand clapping" koan or exclaiming "mu".
Daniel Dennett used the idea of religion as a meme (or as a set of memes) as a basis for much of his analysis of religion in his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.
Fundamentalist Christianity has associated a particular set of politico-social ideas/memeplexes with a separate set of religious ideas/memeplexes that have "replicated" very effectively for many centuries — notions such as "render unto Caesar", individual conscience, or punishment/reward in an afterlife. For other examples of piggybacking involving religious memes, note the conversion-histories of the Hungarians and of Kievan Rus': adoption of Catholicism and Orthodoxy respectively entailed perceived cultural, political and diplomatic benefits and adherence to perceived mainstream civilization.
Personal and intangible experiences which might seem "above" memes may rather have subconscious roots in memes absorbed during a lifetime, as depth psychology might suggest.

Memetic accounts of science

The scientific method offers a body of social and experimental techniques which, given certain preconditions — a free press for the circulation of information, a large number of people prepared to see the universe as a mechanism subject to general regularities which humans can observe, describe and model through repeatable experiments and/or observations — acts highly virulently, spreading quickly through an educated population as journals circulate and blogs proliferate. By demonstrating its success at making predictions, science as a practice can make itself more attractive to potential converts. Whether or not experimenters can necessarily verify them, ideas and attitudes — those which scientists tend to hold or those which feel aesthetically pleasing in combination with scientific discoveries — can propagate themselves in societies where science has a high status by the process of meme piggybacking.
Furthermore, one can view the scientific method as a successful meta-memetical means of selecting those memeplexes best suited for explaining observable physical processes, through its mechanism (parallel to the evolutionary algorithm used in computer science) of providing standardized methods for creating and evaluating competing populations of solutions to a given problem.

Memetic explanations of racism

When regarded as non-conscious replicators (much like viruses), individual memes generally lack moral goodness or badness. However, the behaviors that memes generate in individuals and groups can have moral implications. History furnishes many examples of the moral implications of racist/ethnic/class memes when they interact with politics, such as the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Racism provides an example of a common meme: an ideology that has come to separate people, causing the deaths of some targets or practitioners (the latter due to backlash) and threatening the lives of those who do not conform with racist norms. Once introduced into a culture, memes evolve (note antisemitism as a form of xenophobia) and spread through society, sometimes becoming both harmful and attractive so that they spread like a virus.(Ref.: 1994 G. Burchett)
In Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology, Jack Balkin argued that memetic processes can explain many of the most familiar features of ideological thought. His theory of "cultural software" maintained that memes form narratives, networks of cultural associations, metaphoric and metonymic models, and a variety of different mental structures. Some of these structures can help generate racist and anti-Semitic beliefs, by making this kind of belief spread fast and wide. Conversely, some memes can have moral implications that most observers might deem positive, such as the meme of anti-racism, which tends/aims to generate behaviors of tolerance.

Memetic accounts of personality

Memeticists often define an individual's mind as a "playground for memes" or as an "ecology of memes", where the different memes that have colonized that mind at different times interact with each other. For example, when a mind successfully infected by the memeplex for religion X becomes exposed to the memeplex for religion Y, memeplex X may repulse memeplex Y: X can block Y from infecting the mind (for instance through use of such memetic components as the meme that "all other religions apart from X are evil").
In a person’s history, language provides the first and most important memetic infection. Indeed, memeticians generally regard language as a memetically-evolved phenomenon. For example, even at the level of animals, many species have evolved particular cries to convey different meanings, such as "danger", "hungry", "aroused", "go away" or "come here". Experiments can verify the memetic nature of the cries of these species, showing for example that the cries do not arise when humans raise the animals concerned: they do not generate the cries by instinct, but learn them from other animals. Human language, as a memetically-evolved tool, can serve not only to communicate concepts between humans, but also to combine low-abstraction concepts into higher-abstraction ones. This combination/abstraction process, seen memetically, constitutes creative breeding of memes, where the interaction of several memes results in the birth of a new, combined meme. For example, the mind of Richard Dawkins saw the creative breeding of its memes for "replicator", "culture", and "mind", and this breeding gave birth to the new meme of "meme".
After humans become infected with the memeplex for language — generally during babyhood — they get infected with a series of higher-abstraction memes, and especially values-memes. Depending on the education received by the person, the lessons drawn from experience, and the surrounding cultural materials (tales, songs, books, etc), a certain ecology and history of meme-infection and interaction builds up within that person’s mind. Memes generate behaviors in their host — either spoken or acted behaviors. Because each person has an individual memetic infection and interaction history, there emerge singular behavior patterns. We conventionally refer to what memeticists regard as meme-generated patterns of behavior as a person's personality.

Memetic engineering

Memetic engineering (a term was coined by Leveious Rolando, Gibran Burchett, and John Sokol.) consists of the process of developing memes, through meme-splicing and memetic synthesis, with the intent of altering the behavior of others. It involves creating and developing theories or ideologies based on an analytical study of societies, their ways of thinking and the evolution of the minds that comprise them. Attempts at Artificial Meme-Phrase Creation have not met with noted success, though apocryphal stories tell of the putative origins of these sorts of memes.
Sometimes people modify and fabricate memes consciously, even intentionally (think the self-image of advertising agencies, for example — though some argue that the intention comes from the memes). This would help to explain how rapidly, extensively and usefully memetic evolution has functioned in and for culture. People apply many ever-evolving meme-based systems of analysis and error-correction to all information flowing in and out. Just as genetic material has developed gene-based error-correction models, memetic systems have "found" it advantageous to associate with meme-based error-correction models.
However, attempting to popularize a fabricated meme or an unproven theory often results in a backlash against said meme: the originators of a meme may appear to have a hidden agenda, as in the case of intelligent design, the meme of which some perceived as an apparently scientific relabeling of creationism.

Memetic evolution

Evolution requires not only inheritance and natural selection but also variation, and memes also exhibit this property. Ideas may undergo changes in transmission which accumulate over time. Generations of hosts pass on these changes in the phenotype (the information in brains or in retention systems). In other words, unlike genetic evolution, memetic evolution can show both Darwinian and Lamarckian traits. For example, folk tales and myths often become embellished in the retelling to make them more memorable or more appropriate and therefore more impressed listeners have a greater likelihood of retelling them, complete with accumulating embellishments that may serve to modify human behavior. More modern examples appear in the various urban legends and hoaxes — such as the Goodtimes virus warning — that circulate on the Internet.
Dawkins observed that cultures can evolve in much the same way that populations of organisms evolve. Various ideas pass from one generation to the next; such ideas may either enhance or detract from the survival of the people who obtain those ideas, or influence the survival of the ideas themselves. This process can affect which of those ideas will survive for passing on to future generations. For example, a certain culture may have unique designs and methods of tool-making that another culture may not have; therefore, the culture with the more effective methods may prosper more than the other culture, ceteris paribus. This leads to a higher proportion of the overall population adopting the more effective methods as time passes. Each tool-design thus acts somewhat similarly to a biological gene in that some populations have it and others do not, and the meme's function directly affects the presence of the design in future generations. Similarly, like the biological evolutionary process, cultures can retain memes that once served a purpose during one epoch or era as vestigial memes — note the survival of astrology. Such evolutionary misdirection resembles (debatably) the survival of the vermiform appendix, or of wisdom teeth in humans.

Propagation of memes

Memes have as an important characteristic their propagation through imitation, a concept introduced by the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde. Imitation involves copying the observed behaviour of another individual. Typically imitators copy behaviour from observing other humans, but they may also copy from an inanimate source, such as from a book or from a musical score. Imitation may depend on brains sufficiently powerful to assess the key aspects of the imitated behavior (what to copy and why) as well as its potential benefits.
Researchers have observed memetic copying in just a few species on Earth, including hominids, dolphins and birds (which learn how to sing by imitating their parents ).
When imitation first evolved in the animal ancestors of humans, it proved itself a valuable skill for learning, which increased an individual's ability to reproduce genetically. Some have speculated that sexual selection of the best imitators further drove a genetic increase in the ability of brains to imitate well.
Memetics suggests that memes have the potential for a much more lasting effect than genes: humans continue to quote prophets, popes and teachers who had no known lineal blood-descendants. Most organisms pass their genes on to their offspring sexually, but with every generation the genetic contribution of a given ancestor halves — so that a person only has a quarter of their grandfather's personal genes. Susan Blackmore has evaluated the legacy of Socrates. Since the 5th century BC, Socrates' genes have become thoroughly diluted (dispersed); however, his memes still have a profound effect on modern thought and on contemporary philosophical discourse.
In modern times, the advent of the Internet — and more specifically of email — has provided memes with a high-fidelity propagation medium that enables highly prolific memes to propagate quickly. For example, chain-emails furnish a significant instance: in-depth studies have examined their evolution and mutation based on their differential survival rate. Paper-based chain-letters, predecessors to this meme-distribution net, have also attracted study, but they have a lower propagation-rate due to the higher copying effort, and a higher mutation-rate may have occurred due to manual transcription or degraded photocopying, thus potentially reducing their lifespan. It seems plausible that the first email chain-letters started when recipients transcribed paper-based chain-letters to email, suggesting that memes can move from one propagation medium to another (more efficient) one.

Evolutionary influences on memes

If one accepts the memetic description, it still remains to single out which memes have good potential for spreading. One can make an analogy with biology. To be able to say something about the spread of a gene in birds that affect their wings ornithologists need to know about both population genetics and aerodynamics. Similarly, memeticists need to complement the description of memes with a description of what makes a meme easily absorbable by people other than the original carrier.
Only the number of extant copies (and where those copies reside) determine the measurable success of a gene or of a meme. A strong (but not complete) correlation exists between genes that do well and genes that have a positive effect on the organism which contains those genes. And if we can restrict attention to memes normally interpreted as statements of fact, then a correlation emerges between those memes that do well and those that reflect reality. However, some genes and memes do survive which owe their success to other factors. Similarly, a correlation exists between successful memes of a technological/economic nature and those that help the economy (such as slavery and free markets (each in their day), for instance).
A gene's success in a body may stem from its attempt to bypass the normal sexual lottery by making itself present in more than 50% of zygotes in an organism. Some genes find other ways of having themselves transmitted between cells. Hence multiple factors influence the evolution of genes — not just the success of the species as a whole. Similarly the evolutionary pressures on memes include much more than just truth and economic success. Evolutionary pressures may include the following:
  1. Experience: If a meme does not correlate with an individual's experience, then that individual has a reduced likelihood of remembering that meme.
  2. Pleasure/Pain: If a meme results in more pleasure or less pain for its host then the host will have a greater likelihood of remembering it.
  3. Fear/Bribery: If a meme constitutes a threat then people may become frightened into believing it. Similarly, if a meme promises some future benefit then people may incline to believe it. The memes "if you do X you will burn in hell" and "do Y and you will go to heaven" provide examples. Memes which pass on the fear of a threat, of the likelihood or effectiveness of a threat, that "something will happen if you do such and such a thing", have a high likelihood of success, and may therefore replicate and remain in the meme-pool. They may assist in this way in the survival of a thought, a theme or a philosophy within a community.
  4. Censorship: If an organisation destroys any retention-systems containing a particular meme or otherwise controls the usage of that meme, then that meme may suffer a selective disadvantage.
  5. Economics: If people or organisations with economic influence exhibit a particular meme, then the meme has a greater likelihood of benefiting from a greater audience. If a meme tends to increase the riches of an individual holding it, then that meme may spread because of imitation. Such memes might include "Hard work is good" and "Put number one first".
  6. Distinction: If the meme enables hearers to recognize and respect tellers (as leaders, intelligent people, insightful, etc.), then the meme has a greater chance of spreading. The erstwhile receivers will want to become themselves tellers of the same meme (or of an evolved/mutated version). Thus élite knowledge can provide a promotion to élite status.
Memes, like genes, do not purposely do or want anything — they either get replicated or not. Some meme systems have negative effects on the host or on their host society (revenge killings, for example), but humans generally have a symbiotic relationship with these abstract entities.
Memes do not mutate in an exclusively passive way. The brain inhabited by a meme system can carry out a sort of active modification of a meme. One could draw an analogy with a cell's error-correction systems, but they clearly function quite differently. People create and modify memes almost continuously. One can modify, manipulate, and create meme systems in thought, for instance through internal dialogue. As soon as one opens one's mouth and says something (or does something) that one has not copied (but that others can copy), one has unleashed a novel meme. Thus, one could conclude that we all perform the role of a memetic engineer to some degree (even if not consciously).
This seems especially evident in modern society, more notably in the scientific and philosophical realms and in the entertainment industry. It has become standard practice for scientists and philosophers alike to assemble memetic systems and to question their philosophical and empirical integrity. On perceiving a flaw, one may seek theoretical (mathematical/thought experiments/logic/analysis) or empirical (experimental/observational) resolution. This happens in large part due to the influence of some of the more "modern" philosophers of the past. Over the last few hundred (or thousand) years, a "philosophy" or paradigm has evolved and developed which benefits the societies in which many embrace it. That philosophy includes the moral and scientific obligation to take nothing for granted and always to question any new information one perceives. People following this tradition have transformed the memetic base of modern science and philosophy. These people include Zoroaster, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Albert Einstein, Karl Marx, Benjamin Franklin and Karl Popper. Science accepts nothing as true unless empirical evidence and observation suggests such "truth" strongly and consistently. This entire procedure adheres to a meme-system that has evolved to the point of rejecting almost any absolute truth-claim. This meme-system now includes such novel analytical paradigms as the scientific method and Dewey's Decision-Making model (among many other meme-based systems) to help distinguish useful (or truthful) meme-systems from "bad" ones.
Francis Heylighen of the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies has postulated what he calls "memetic selection criteria". These criteria opened the way to a specialized field of applied memetics to find out if these selection criteria could stand the test of quantitative analyses.
The cultural materialism view in anthropology holds that the evolutionary pressures of economy and ecology explain many aspects of human culture. For example, the food taboos sometimes enshrined in religions — such as the concepts of sacred cows, kosher and halal — would have prospered because they allowed the believing population to (say) live more hygienically and thus survive longer than non-believers in environments possibly more hostile to survival. A migration or a change of the economic infrastructure could render the taboo neutral or even adverse.

Resistance to certain memes

Karl Popper advocated memetic caution in the strongest possible terms: "The survival value of intelligence is that it allows us to extinct a bad idea, before the idea extincts us."
Resistance to violent and destructive courses of action has formed a common meme that can guide human cultural and cognitive evolution away from disastrous paths — for instance the U.S. and USSR stockpiled but did not deploy nuclear weapons in action in the period of the Cold War. Some cultures can consider ignorance a virtue — in particular, ignorance of certain temptations that the culture believes would prove disastrous if pursued by many individuals. See for example the operation of the Index librorum prohibitorum.
The Internet, perhaps the ultimate meme-vector to date, seems to host both sides of this debate. Opposition to use of the Internet can stem from any number of memes: from ethics to intent to ability to resist hacking or pornography.
The Principia Cybernetica project maintains a lexicon of memetics concepts, comprising a list of different types of memes. It also refers to an essay by Jaron Lanier, The ideology of cybernetic totalist intellectuals, which criticises "meme totalists" who assert memes over bodies.

Memetic virus exchange

One controversial application of the "selfish meme" parallel results in the idea that certain collections of memes can act as "memetic viruses": collections of ideas that behave in the manner of independent life-forms which continue to get passed on — even at the expense of their hosts — simply because of their success at getting passed on. Some observers have suggested that evangelical religions and cults behave in this way; so by including the act of passing on their beliefs as a moral virtue, other beliefs of the religion also get passed along — even if they do not provide particular direct benefits to the believer.
Others maintain that the wide prevalence of human adoption of religious ideas provides evidence to suggest that such ideas offer some ecological, sexual, ethical or moral value; otherwise memetic evolution would long ago have selected against such ideas. For example, some religions urge peace and co-operation among their followers ("Thou shalt not murder") which may possibly tend to promote the biological survival of the social groups that carry these memes. However, the idea of group selection stands on shaky ground (to say the least) in the field of genetics. Accordingly, some consider the idea of selection of ideas beneficial to the group exclusively as unlikely.
Dawkins notes that one can distinguish a biological virus from its host's normal genetic material by the fact that it can propagate alone, without the propagation of the entire genetic corpus of the host — or half of it, in the case of diploid sexual reproduction; thus, a virus can "sabotage" the host's other genes. This applies to memes in the sense that a meme that requires the success of its hosts has a greater likelihood of favouring the interests of these hosts than does a meme capable of succeeding even if each host quickly dies. For example, the commonplace meme which encourages people to wash their hands after they use the toilet or before handling food, and which reminds others to do the same, does not appear harmful. In contrast, a meme telling people to quit their jobs, abandon their families, and run around spreading the meme seems quite virulent.

Reproductive isolation in meme "speciation"

In traditional population genetics the normal genetic variation, genetic selection, and genetic drift do not lead to the formation of a new species without some form of "reproductive isolation". Thus in order to split a single species into two species, the two subpopulations of the original species must ultimately lose their ability to interbreed, which would normally maintain their heterogeneity. However, once separated, natural selection and/or mere genetic drift acting on the normal genetic variation in the two subspecies will eventually change enough characteristics of the two subgroups to preclude them interbreeding, which (by a common definition of what constitutes a species) means that they will comprise two different species. Examples of reproductive isolation include geographical isolation, where a suddenly-appearing mountain range or river separates two subgroups; temporal isolation (isolation by time), where one subgroup becomes entirely diurnal in its habits while the other becomes entirely nocturnal; or even just "behavioral" isolation, as seen in wolves and domestic dogs: they could interbreed, biologically speaking, but normally they do not.
A similar phenomenon can occur with memes. Normally, the population of individuals having a meme in their consciousness contains sufficient internal variation and mixes enough to keep a given meme relatively intact (although it covers a wide range of variations). Should that population become split, however, without sufficient contact for the two different subgroups of variations of the meme to equilibrate, eventually each group will evolve its own version of that meme, each version differing sufficiently from that of the other group to appear as a distinct entity.
The Kellerman meme provides an example of this occurring on the Internet. A search of the web and/or Usenet for the word 'Kellerman' will turn up many citations, describing at great length the behavior of a "Dr. Arthur Kellerman", who, with the willing assistance of the Centers for Disease Control and the public-health lobby, purportedly fabricated studies in order to implicate firearms (and by extension their owners) as a menace to public safety, for the purposes of statist control of the population. The authors of these pages and postings describe purported machinations, "junk science", a subsequent recantation by Dr. "Kellerman", and the use of his work by proponents of gun control.. Compare the work of the differently spelled scientist Arthur Kellermann.
The original meme of Kellermann and his work on gun-related violent injury has generated a new meme ("Dr. Kellerman is an evil lying gun-grabbing enemy of freedom") by the classic genetic phenomenon of a deletion mutation. The sub-population involved had strongly negative attitudes towards Kellermann's work as well as a lack of firsthand familiarity with his studies and career. Because of the "reproductive isolation" caused by the total non-intersection of the results of searches for "Kellerman" and "Kellermann", the Kellerman-meme drifted even further in the direction of negativity, unchecked by facts related to the real Kellermann. As this group encounters new individuals of similar general outlook, they introduce new recruits to the "Kellerman" lore only, and go on to produce their own websites and postings furthering the rapid progress of this meme.
(This phenomenon also demonstrates two other features of memes — the "meme-complex" (memeplex) as a set of mutually-assisting "co-memes" which have co-evolved a symbiotic relationship, and the "Villain vs. Victim" infection strategy.)

Expansion of concept

The propagation of memes follows a phenomenon that also appears in many other fields of study. One can expand the same principles to include all material patterns as well, in the sense that every material pattern in the universe exists to an extent proportional to its frequency of appearance, longevity and ability to reproduce (or to allow copying by others).
The material pattern "shoes", for instance, reproduces dependently on the meme of how to create shoes, which in turn depends on its ability to benefit human beings. Nevertheless one can view it, like the material patterns it depends on, as a "selfish" material pattern, only benefiting human beings to such extent as to favour its own rate of reproduction by human agency.

See also

References

Literature

  1. Henson, H. Keith: Memes Meta-Memes and Politics, 1988
  2. Henson, H. Keith and Arel Lucas: "Memes, Evolution, and Creationism", 1989
  3. Khan, Pir Hazrat Inayat: The Music of Life, Omega Uniform Edition, 2nd edition, 1993, trade paperback: 353 pages, ISBN 0-930872-38-X. An introduction to the muwakkals (Eastern memes).
  4. Dennett, Daniel: Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1991. ISBN 0316180653
  5. Dennett, Daniel: Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, 1995
  6. Brodie, Richard: Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme. Integral Press, September 1995, 251 pages, ISBN 0-9636001-1-7
  7. Bloom, Howard: The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History. Atlantic Monthly Press, February 1997, 480 pages, ISBN 0-87113-664-3
  8. Blackmore, Susan: The Meme Machine. Oxford University Press, 1999, hardcover ISBN 0-19-850365-2, trade paperback ISBN 0-9658817-8-4, May 2000, ISBN 0-19-286212-X
  9. Fog, Agner: Cultural Selection. Dordrecht: Kluwer 1999. ISBN 0-7923-5579-2.
  10. Lynch, Aaron: Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society. Basic Books, 1999, ISBN 0-465-08467-2
    1. Review: "The new pseudo-science of memes"
  11. Stephenson, Neal: Snow Crash. Bantam Doubleday Dell, reprint, 2000, trade paperback: 440 pages, ISBN 0-553-38095-8 (science-fiction novel about a metavirus engineered to activate as a meme in the brain, spreading through a number of vectors such as actual physical viruses, images, and others)
  12. Flannery, Tim: "Eyes at the back of your head: How Richard Semon's memes gave way to Richard Dawkins's memes". Times Literary Supplement, October 19, 2001
  13. Atran, Scott: "The Trouble with Memes", Human Nature 12, 4 (2001), S. 351 ff. http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/documents/disk0/00/00/01/23/ijn_00000123_00/ijn_00000123_00.doc
  14. Aunger, Robert: The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think. Free Press, 2002, hardcover ISBN 0-7432-0150-7
  15. Aunger, Robert: Darwinizing culture: the status of memetics as a science. Oxford University Press, 2000, New-York ISBN 0-19-263244-2
  16. Henson, H. Keith: "Sex, Drugs, and Cults. An evolutionary psychology perspective on why and how cult memes get a drug-like hold on people, and what might be done to mitigate the effects", The Human Nature Review 2002 Volume 2: 343-355 http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/cults.html
  17. H. Keith Henson: "Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War."
  18. Lanier, Jaron: "The Ideology of Cybernetic Totalist Intellectuals", an essay which criticises "meme totalists" who assert memes over bodies.
  19. Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
  20. Principia Cybernetica holds a lexicon of memetics concepts, comprising a list of different types of memes.
  21. A list of memetics publications on the web
  22. Ericsson-Zenith, Steven: Memeiosis , a formal characterization of memes.
  23. Situngkir, Hokky: Culture as Complex Adaptive System, formal interplays between memetics and cultural analysis.
  24. Chielens, Klaas: The Viral Aspects of Language: A Quantitative Research of Memetic Selection Criteria
  25. Distin, Kate: The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment. Cambridge University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-521-60627-6
  26. Hugo, Victor: Notre Dame de Paris (translated into English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame), 1831
  27. Dennett, Daniel: Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon , 2006
  28. Gibson, William: Pattern Recognition, page 95, "Word-of-mouth meme thing. We don't really know what it does, yet.", 2003.

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