MEME

A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream"[1]) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.

Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.[3]

In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. In the context of the exact sciences, memetics suffers in comparison because, unlike the idea of genes, memes do not necessarily have or need a concrete medium in order to transfer.
[edit] Transmission

Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means).

The British scientist Richard Dawkins introduced the word "meme" in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a basis for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.

Some commentators question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units.

A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream"[1]) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.

A field of study called memetics[6] arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model.

Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.[3]

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success.

This issue 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.

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success.

Cognitive: ideas perceived as cogent by most in the population who encounter them.

Dawkins wrote 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.

Another critique comes from semiotics, (e.g.,

A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream"[1]) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success.

John S. Wilkins retained the notion of meme as a kernel of cultural imitation while emphasizing the meme's evolutionary aspect, defining the meme as "the least unit of sociocultural information relative to a selection process that has favourable or unfavourable selection bias that exceeds its endogenous tendency to change."[12]

Dawkins states that he did not know of the "mneme"[citation needed], and said that he wanted "a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'".[1]

Applications
* 7 Religion
* 8 Memetic explanations of racism
* 9 Internet culture
* 10 See also
* 11 Notes
* 12 References
* 13 External links

[edit] Origins and concepts

Historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from Greek mneme, “memory”), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the German Lamarckist biologist Richard Semon titled Die Mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen (loosely translat...

Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.[3]

Blackmore meets such criticism by stating that memes compare with genes in this respect: that while a gene has no particular size, nor can we ascribe every phenotypic feature directly to a particular gene, it has value because it encapsulates that key unit of inherited expression subject to evolutionary pressures.

Children respond particularly receptively to the ideas of their parents, and thus ideas which directly or indirectly encourage a higher birthrate will replicate themselves at a higher rate than those that discourage higher birthrates.
2.

Categories: Memetics | Collective intelligence | Cultural anthropology | Evolutionary psychology | Futurology | Internet memes | Philosophy of mind | Units of morphological analysis | Units of information (cognitive processes) | Words coined in the 1970s | Concepts
Hidden categories: Articles that may contain original research from September 2008 | All articles that may contain original research | Articles lacking in-text citations from November 2009 | All articles lacking in-text citations ...

Memetics attempts to apply conventional scientific methods (such as those used in population genetics and epidemiology) to explain existing patterns and transmission of cultural ideas.

Applications
* 7 Religion
* 8 Memetic explanations of racism
* 9 Internet culture
* 10 See also
* 11 Notes
* 12 References
* 13 External links

[edit] Origins and concepts

Historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from Greek mneme, “memory”), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the German Lamarckist biologist Richard Semon titled Die Mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen (loosely translat...

By linking altruism with religious affiliation, religious memes can proliferate more quickly because people perceive that they can reap societal as well as personal rewards.

Dawkins defined the meme as a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation, but later definitions would vary.

In 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.

Some commentators question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units.

Some commentators have likened the transmission of memes to the spread of contagions.[10]

Principal criticisms[which?] of memetics include the claim that memetics ignores established advances in other fields of cultural study, such as sociology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, and social psychology.

I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.

Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[13]
[edit] Evolutionary influences on memes

Richard Dawkins noted the three conditions which must exist for evolution to occur:[14]

1. variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements
2. heredity o...

Balkin describes racist beliefs as "fantasy" memes which become harmful or unjust "ideologies" when diverse peoples come together, as through trade or competition.[26]
[edit] Internet culture
Main article: Internet meme

The term "Internet meme" refers to a catchphrase or concept that spreads rapidly from person to person via the Internet, largely through Internet-based email, blogs, forums, Internet-based social networking sites and Internet-based instant messaging.

Social contagions such as fads, hysterias and copycat suicides exemplify memes seen as the contagious imitation of ideas.

Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate.

Online version retrieved 2008-01-27.
17.

Some commentators question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units.

Motivational: ideas that people adopt because they perceive some self-interest in adopting them.

Principal criticisms[which?] of memetics include the claim that memetics ignores established advances in other fields of cultural study, such as sociology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, and social psychology.

Examples include Rickrolling, Pingas!, lolcats, "Leave Britney Alone", Keyboard Cat, and "All your base are belong to us".[27]
[edit] See also

* Cultural evolution
* Dual inheritance theory
* Electronic Revolution
* Evolutionary linguistics
* History of ideas
* Imitation
* Internet Meme
* Know Your Meme
* Memetics
* Memetic engineering
* Self-replication
* Sociocultural evolution
* Spiral Dynamics
* Viral marketing
* Viral v...

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success.

Memes spread through the behaviors that they generate in their hosts.

Aaron Lynch described seven general patterns of meme transmission, or "thought contagion":[11]

1.

Other examples of the varying degrees of criticism of memetics include the following:
[edit] Lack of philosophical appeal

In his chapter titled "Truth" published in the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, Dieter Lohmar questions the memeticists' reduction of the highly complex body of ideas (such as religion, politics, war, justice, and science itself) to a putatively one-dimensional series of memes.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 368, ISBN 0192177737
* Dennett, Daniel C. (2006), Breaking the Spell, Viking (Penguin), ISBN 0-670-03472-X
* Dennett, Daniel (1991), Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., ISBN 0316180653
* Distin, Kate (2005), The selfish meme: a critical reassessment, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 238, ISBN 0-521-60627-6
* Farnish, Keith, "Time's Up! An Uncivilized Solution To A Global Crisis", Totnes: Green B...

Meme theory commonly cites memes grouped in memeplexes of religion as examples.[16]
[edit] Memetics
Main article: Memetics

The discipline of memetics, which dates from the mid 1980s, provides an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme.

Susan Blackmore writes that melodies from Beethoven's symphonies are commonly used to illustrate the difficulty involved in delimiting memes as discrete units.

As factual criticism, he refers to the lack of a code script for memes, as the DNA is for genes, and to the fact that the meme mutation mechanism (i.e., an idea going from one brain to another) is too unstable (low replication accuracy and high mutation rate), which would render the evolutionary process chaotic.[18]

Examples include Rickrolling, Pingas!, lolcats, "Leave Britney Alone", Keyboard Cat, and "All your base are belong to us".[27]
[edit] See also

* Cultural evolution
* Dual inheritance theory
* Electronic Revolution
* Evolutionary linguistics
* History of ideas
* Imitation
* Internet Meme
* Know Your Meme
* Memetics
* Memetic engineering
* Self-replication
* Sociocultural evolution
* Spiral Dynamics
* Viral marketing
* Viral v...

By linking altruism with religious affiliation, religious memes can proliferate more quickly because people perceive that they can reap societal as well as personal rewards.

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success.

(The etymology of the term relates to the Greek word μιμητισμός (pronounced /mɪmetɪsmos/) for "something imitated".)[2]

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 or neighbors).[9]

By linking altruism with religious affiliation, religious memes can proliferate more quickly because people perceive that they can reap societal as well as personal rewards.

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success.

Categories: Memetics | Collective intelligence | Cultural anthropology | Evolutionary psychology | Futurology | Internet memes | Philosophy of mind | Units of morphological analysis | Units of information (cognitive processes) | Words coined in the 1970s | Concepts
Hidden categories: Articles that may contain original research from September 2008 | All articles that may contain original research | Articles lacking in-text citations from November 2009 | All articles lacking in-text citations ...

Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.[3]

For example, religions that preach of the value of faith-based belief over evidence from everyday experience or reason inoculate societies against many of the most basic tools people commonly use to evaluate their ideas.

In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. In the context of the exact sciences, memetics suffers in comparison because, unlike the idea of genes, memes do not necessarily have or need a concrete medium in order to transfer.
[edit] Transmission

Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means).

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success.

The image of the crucifixion recurs in religious sacraments, and the proliferation of symbols of the cross (itself a meme) in homes and churches potently reinforces the wide array of Christian memes.[11]
[edit] Memetic explanations of racism

In Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology, Jack Balkin argued that memetic processes can explain many of the most familiar features of ideological thought.

Categories: Memetics | Collective intelligence | Cultural anthropology | Evolutionary psychology | Futurology | Internet memes | Philosophy of mind | Units of morphological analysis | Units of information (cognitive processes) | Words coined in the 1970s | Concepts
Hidden categories: Articles that may contain original research from September 2008 | All articles that may contain original research | Articles lacking in-text citations from November 2009 | All articles lacking in-text citations ...

The British scientist Richard Dawkins introduced the word "meme" in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a basis for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.

Contents
[hide]

* 1 Origins and concepts
* 2 Transmission
* 3 Memes as discrete units
* 4 Evolutionary influences on memes
* 5 Memetics
* 6 Criticism of meme theory
o 6.1

Reflections from the perspective of the history and philosophy of evolutionary biology", Journal of Memetics 2, http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/
13.

Dawkins noted that as various ideas pass from one generation to the next, they may either enhance or detract from the survival of the people who obtain those ideas, or influence the survival of the ideas themselves.

For Dawkins, the meme exemplified another self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.

Ideas which encourage longevity in their hosts, or leave their hosts particularly resistant to abandoning or replacing these ideas, enhance the preservability of memes and afford protection from the competition or proselytism of other memes.
5.

Cultural separatism exemplifies one practice in which one can expect a higher rate of meme-replication — because the meme for separation creates a barrier from exposure to competing ideas.
3.

Dawkins states that he did not know of the "mneme"[citation needed], and said that he wanted "a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'".[1]

Memes too, he writes, have the properties necessary for evolution, and thus meme evolution is not simply analogous to genetic evolution, but a real phenomenon subject to the laws of natural selection.

Memetics thus remains a theory in its infancy, a protoscience to proponents, or a pseudoscience to some detractors[who?].
[edit] Criticism of meme theory

An 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.

Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate.

Reflections from the perspective of the history and philosophy of evolutionary biology", Journal of Memetics 2, http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/
13.

In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. In the context of the exact sciences, memetics suffers in comparison because, unlike the idea of genes, memes do not necessarily have or need a concrete medium in order to transfer.
[edit] Transmission

Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means).

* Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.

Balkin maintains that the same structures used to generate ideas about free speech or free markets also serve to generate racist beliefs.

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success.

One view sees memes as providing a useful philosophical perspective with which to examine cultural evolution.

Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catch-phrases, beliefs (notably religious beliefs), clothing fashion, and the technology of building arches.[4]

Applications
* 7 Religion
* 8 Memetic explanations of racism
* 9 Internet culture
* 10 See also
* 11 Notes
* 12 References
* 13 External links

[edit] Origins and concepts

Historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from Greek mneme, “memory”), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the German Lamarckist biologist Richard Semon titled Die Mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen (loosely translat...

The highly interconnected, multi-layering of 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".

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success.

* Jan, Steven: The Memetics of Music: A Neo-Darwinian View of Musical Structure and Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)
* Kelly, Kevin (1994), Out of control: the new biology of machines, social systems and the economic world, Boston: Addison-Wesley, pp. 360, ISBN 0-201-48340-8
* Lynch, Aaron (1996), Thought contagion: how belief spreads through society, New York: BasicBooks, pp. 208, ISBN 0-465-08467-2
* Post, Stephen Garrard; Underwood, Lynn G; Schloss, Jeffrey P Garrard (2002...

The longevity of religious memes improves with their documentation in revered religious texts.[8]

(The etymology of the term relates to the Greek word μιμητισμός (pronounced /mɪmetɪsmos/) for "something imitated".)[2]

The image of the crucifixion recurs in religious sacraments, and the proliferation of symbols of the cross (itself a meme) in homes and churches potently reinforces the wide array of Christian memes.[11]
[edit] Memetic explanations of racism

In Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology, Jack Balkin argued that memetic processes can explain many of the most familiar features of ideological thought.

Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.[3]

To emphasize commonality with genes, Dawkins coined the term "meme" by shortening "mimeme", which derives from the Greek word mimema ("something imitated").[1]

Applications
* 7 Religion
* 8 Memetic explanations of racism
* 9 Internet culture
* 10 See also
* 11 Notes
* 12 References
* 13 External links

[edit] Origins and concepts

Historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from Greek mneme, “memory”), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the German Lamarckist biologist Richard Semon titled Die Mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen (loosely translat...

Dawkins defined the meme as a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation, but later definitions would vary.

The highly interconnected, multi-layering of 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".

Without such an explanation memes (seen in such terms) find themselves without reason, limited to cover all but science and memetics itself.[citation needed] Others have countered that meme-perspectives do not exclude talk of meaning, truth, or falsity as relevant.[25]
[edit] Religion
See also: Evolutionary psychology of religion

Although evolutionists[who?] had previously[when?] sought to understand and explain religion in terms of a cultural attribute which might conceivably confer...

Memes spread through the behaviors that they generate in their hosts.

Memes spread through the behaviors that they generate in their hosts.

Imitation often involves the copying of an observed behaviour of another individual, but memes may transmit from one individual to another through a copy recorded in an inanimate source, such as a book or a musical score.

The British scientist Richard Dawkins introduced the word "meme" in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a basis for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.

Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that scholarship can examine memes empirically.

In keeping with the thesis that in evolution one can regard organisms simply as suitable "hosts" for reproducing genes, Dawkins argues that one can view people as "hosts" for replicating memes.

Memetics attempts to apply conventional scientific methods (such as those used in population genetics and epidemiology) to explain existing patterns and transmission of cultural ideas.

A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream"[1]) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.

Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catch-phrases, beliefs (notably religious beliefs), clothing fashion, and the technology of building arches.[4]

In 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.

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").

Lack of philosophical appeal
o 6.2

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.

The meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless if that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme.

To Balkin, whether memes become harmful or maladaptive depends on the environmental context in which they exist rather than in any special source or manner to their origination.

Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behaviour.

Ideas which encourage longevity in their hosts, or leave their hosts particularly resistant to abandoning or replacing these ideas, enhance the preservability of memes and afford protection from the competition or proselytism of other memes.
5.

Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[13]
[edit] Evolutionary influences on memes

Richard Dawkins noted the three conditions which must exist for evolution to occur:[14]

1. variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements
2. heredity o...

* Jan, Steven: The Memetics of Music: A Neo-Darwinian View of Musical Structure and Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)
* Kelly, Kevin (1994), Out of control: the new biology of machines, social systems and the economic world, Boston: Addison-Wesley, pp. 360, ISBN 0-201-48340-8
* Lynch, Aaron (1996), Thought contagion: how belief spreads through society, New York: BasicBooks, pp. 208, ISBN 0-465-08467-2
* Post, Stephen Garrard; Underwood, Lynn G; Schloss, Jeffrey P Garrard (2002...

A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream"[1]) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.

For example, religions that preach of the value of faith-based belief over evidence from everyday experience or reason inoculate societies against many of the most basic tools people commonly use to evaluate their ideas.

Despite the subjects' own expectations of consensus, interpretations of the commandments showed wide ranges of variation, with little evidence of consensus.

Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catch-phrases, beliefs (notably religious beliefs), clothing fashion, and the technology of building arches.[4]

A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream"[1]) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success.

Dawkins likened the process by which memes survive and change through the evolution of culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution.[4]

In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. In the context of the exact sciences, memetics suffers in comparison because, unlike the idea of genes, memes do not necessarily have or need a concrete medium in order to transfer.
[edit] Transmission

Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means).

The term derives from the original concept of memes, although it has come to refer to a much more narrowly defined category of cultural information.

The 1981 book Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process by Charles J. Lumsden and E. O. Wilson proposed the theory that genes and culture co-evolve, and that the fundamental biological units of culture must correspond to neuronal networks that function as nodes of semantic memory.

Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[13]
[edit] Evolutionary influences on memes

Richard Dawkins noted the three conditions which must exist for evolution to occur:[14]

1. variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements
2. heredity or repli...

This forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single unit of self-replicating information found on the self-replicating chromosome.

A field of study called memetics[6] arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model.

Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.[3]

Cognitive: ideas perceived as cogent by most in the population who encounter them.

Children respond particularly receptively to the ideas of their parents, and thus ideas which directly or indirectly encourage a higher birthrate will replicate themselves at a higher rate than those that discourage higher birthrates.
2.

In keeping with the thesis that in evolution one can regard organisms simply as suitable "hosts" for reproducing genes, Dawkins argues that one can view people as "hosts" for replicating memes.

Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catch-phrases, beliefs (notably religious beliefs), clothing fashion, and the technology of building arches.[4]

Oxford University Press. p. 186.

A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream"[1]) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.

While the identification of memes as "units" conveys their nature to replicate as discrete, indivisible entities, it does not imply that thoughts somehow become quantized or that "atomic" ideas exist which cannot be dissected into smaller pieces.

Categories: Memetics | Collective intelligence | Cultural anthropology | Evolutionary psychology | Futurology | Internet memes | Philosophy of mind | Units of morphological analysis | Units of information (cognitive processes) | Words coined in the 1970s | Concepts
Hidden categories: Articles that may contain original research from September 2008 | All articles that may contain original research | Articles lacking in-text citations from November 2009 | All articles lacking in-text citations ...

^ Kelly & 1994 p.360:"But if we consider culture as its own self organizing system,— a system with its own agenda and pressure to survive— then the history of humanity gets even more interesting.

Many religions feature adversarial elements, punishing apostasy, for instance, or demonizing infidels.

The image of the crucifixion recurs in religious sacraments, and the proliferation of symbols of the cross (itself a meme) in homes and churches potently reinforces the wide array of Christian memes.[11]
[edit] Memetic explanations of racism

In Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology, Jack Balkin argued that memetic processes can explain many of the most familiar features of ideological thought.

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success.

Aaron Lynch described seven general patterns of meme transmission, or "thought contagion":[11]

1.

Susan Blackmore writes that melodies from Beethoven's symphonies are commonly used to illustrate the difficulty involved in delimiting memes as discrete units.

Reflections from the perspective of the history and philosophy of evolutionary biology", Journal of Memetics 2, http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/
13.

Applications
* 7 Religion
* 8 Memetic explanations of racism
* 9 Internet culture
* 10 See also
* 11 Notes
* 12 References
* 13 External links

[edit] Origins and concepts

Historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from Greek mneme, “memory”), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the German Lamarckist biologist Richard Semon titled Die Mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen (loosely translat...

Oxford University Press. p. 186.

Categories: Memetics | Collective intelligence | Cultural anthropology | Evolutionary psychology | Futurology | Internet memes | Philosophy of mind | Units of morphological analysis | Units of information (cognitive processes) | Words coined in the 1970s | Concepts
Hidden categories: Articles that may contain original research from September 2008 | All articles that may contain original research | Articles lacking in-text citations from November 2009 | All articles lacking in-text citations ...

Examples include Rickrolling, Pingas!, lolcats, "Leave Britney Alone", Keyboard Cat, and "All your base are belong to us".[27]
[edit] See also

* Cultural evolution
* Dual inheritance theory
* Electronic Revolution
* Evolutionary linguistics
* History of ideas
* Imitation
* Internet Meme
* Know Your Meme
* Memetics
* Memetic engineering
* Self-replication
* Sociocultural evolution
* Spiral Dynamics
* Viral marketing
* Viral v...

Some commentators question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units.

Theorists point out that memes which replicate the most effectively spread best, and some memes may replicate effectively even when they prove detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.[5]

Categories: Memetics | Collective intelligence | Cultural anthropology | Evolutionary psychology | Futurology | Internet memes | Philosophy of mind | Units of morphological analysis | Units of information (cognitive processes) | Words coined in the 1970s | Concepts
Hidden categories: Articles that may contain original research from September 2008 | All articles that may contain original research | Articles lacking in-text citations from November 2009 | All articles lacking in-text citations ...

In 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.

Others such as Bruce Edmonds and Robert Aunger have focused on the need to provide an empirical grounding for memetics to become a useful and respected scientific discipline.[22]

Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time.

Memetics thus remains a theory in its infancy, a protoscience to proponents, or a pseudoscience to some detractors[who?].
[edit] Criticism of meme theory

An 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.

Balkin describes racist beliefs as "fantasy" memes which become harmful or unjust "ideologies" when diverse peoples come together, as through trade or competition.[26]
[edit] Internet culture
Main article: Internet meme

The term "Internet meme" refers to a catchphrase or concept that spreads rapidly from person to person via the Internet, largely through Internet-based email, blogs, forums, Internet-based social networking sites and Internet-based instant messaging.

Strictly speaking, motivationally transmitted memes do not self-propagate, but this mode of transmission often occurs in association with memes self-replicated in the efficiency parental, proselytic and preservational modes.

Lack of philosophical appeal
o 6.2

A third approach, described[by whom?] as "radical memetics", seeks to place memes at the centre of a materialistic theory of mind and of personal identity.[23]

Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catch-phrases, beliefs (notably religious beliefs), clothing fashion, and the technology of building arches.[4]

Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time.

Some critics[who?] have seen the inability to pin an idea or cultural feature to its key units as an insurmountable problem for memetics.

The Quantum of Evolution.

Memetics thus remains a theory in its infancy, a protoscience to proponents, or a pseudoscience to some detractors[who?].
[edit] Criticism of meme theory

An 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.

By linking altruism with religious affiliation, religious memes can proliferate more quickly because people perceive that they can reap societal as well as personal rewards.

John S. Wilkins retained the notion of meme as a kernel of cultural imitation while emphasizing the meme's evolutionary aspect, defining the meme as "the least unit of sociocultural information relative to a selection process that has favourable or unfavourable selection bias that exceeds its endogenous tendency to change."[12]

For example, a certain culture may develop unique designs and methods of tool-making that give it a competitive advantage over another culture.

Dawkins states that he did not know of the "mneme"[citation needed], and said that he wanted "a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'".[1]

The 1981 book Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process by Charles J. Lumsden and E. O. Wilson proposed the theory that genes and culture co-evolve, and that the fundamental biological units of culture must correspond to neuronal networks that function as nodes of semantic memory.

Memes can replicate vertically or horizontally within a single biological generation.

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success.

Lynch asserts that belief in the crucifixion in Christianity amplifies each of its other replication advantages through the indebtedness believers have to their Savior for sacrifice on the cross.

A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream"[1]) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.

^ Burgess, Jean (2008) (reprint, QUT Digital Repository ed.),

The longevity of religious memes improves with their documentation in revered religious texts.[8]

Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 368, ISBN 0192177737
* Dennett, Daniel C. (2006), Breaking the Spell, Viking (Penguin), ISBN 0-670-03472-X
* Dennett, Daniel (1991), Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., ISBN 0316180653
* Distin, Kate (2005), The selfish meme: a critical reassessment, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 238, ISBN 0-521-60627-6
* Farnish, Keith, "Time's Up! An Uncivilized Solution To A Global Crisis", Totnes: Green Books, p...

(The etymology of the term relates to the Greek word μιμητισμός (pronounced /mɪmetɪsmos/) for "something imitated".)[2]

Some critics[who?] have seen the inability to pin an idea or cultural feature to its key units as an insurmountable problem for memetics.

Without such an explanation memes (seen in such terms) find themselves without reason, limited to cover all but science and memetics itself.[citation needed] Others have countered that meme-perspectives do not exclude talk of meaning, truth, or falsity as relevant.[25]
[edit] Religion
See also: Evolutionary psychology of religion

Although evolutionists[who?] had previously[when?] sought to understand and explain religion in terms of a cultural attribute which might conceivably confer...

Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate.

Aaron Lynch attributed the robustness of religious memes in human culture to the fact that such memes incorporate multiple modes of meme transmission.

Some critics[who?] have seen the inability to pin an idea or cultural feature to its key units as an insurmountable problem for memetics.

Without such an explanation memes (seen in such terms) find themselves without reason, limited to cover all but science and memetics itself.[citation needed] Others have countered that meme-perspectives do not exclude talk of meaning, truth, or falsity as relevant.[25]
[edit] Religion
See also: Evolutionary psychology of religion

Although evolutionists[who?] had previously[when?] sought to understand and explain religion in terms of a cultural attribute which might conceivably confer...

Autistics showed a significant tendency to closely paraphrase and repeat content from the original statement (for example: "Don't cut flowers before they bloom").

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success.

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
* Heylighen, Francis; Chielens, K. (2009), "Evolution of Culture, Memetics", in Meyers, B., Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science, Springer, http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/Memetics-Springer.pdf

In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. In the context of the exact sciences, memetics suffers in comparison because, unlike the idea of genes, memes do not necessarily have or need a concrete medium in order to transfer.
[edit] Transmission

Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means).

Adversative: ideas which influence those that hold them to attack or sabotage competing ideas and/or those that hold them.

Autistics showed a significant tendency to closely paraphrase and repeat content from the original statement (for example: "Don't cut flowers before they bloom").

Cultural memes will have the characteristic of Lamarckian inheritance when a host aspires to replicate the given meme through inference rather than by exactly copying it.

Applications
* 7 Religion
* 8 Memetic explanations of racism
* 9 Internet culture
* 10 See also
* 11 Notes
* 12 References
* 13 External links

[edit] Origins and concepts

Historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from Greek mneme, “memory”), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the German Lamarckist biologist Richard Semon titled Die Mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen (loosely translat...

Dawkins noted that as various ideas pass from one generation to the next, they may either enhance or detract from the survival of the people who obtain those ideas, or influence the survival of the ideas themselves.

Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

Ideas which encourage longevity in their hosts, or leave their hosts particularly resistant to abandoning or replacing these ideas, enhance the preservability of memes and afford protection from the competition or proselytism of other memes.
5.

Examples include Rickrolling, Pingas!, lolcats, "Leave Britney Alone", Keyboard Cat, and "All your base are belong to us".[27]
[edit] See also

* Cultural evolution
* Dual inheritance theory
* Electronic Revolution
* Evolutionary linguistics
* History of ideas
* Imitation
* Internet Meme
* Know Your Meme
* Memetics
* Memetic engineering
* Self-replication
* Sociocultural evolution
* Spiral Dynamics
* Viral marketing
* Viral v...

* Journal of Memetics, a peer-refereed journal of memetics published from 1997 until 2005
* Susan Blackmore: Memes and "temes", TED Talks February 2008

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme"

Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.[3]

Another critique comes from semiotics, (e.g.,

Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time.

Cultural separatism exemplifies one practice in which one can expect a higher rate of meme-replication — because the meme for separation creates a barrier from exposure to competing ideas.
3.

The 1981 book Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process by Charles J. Lumsden and E. O. Wilson proposed the theory that genes and culture co-evolve, and that the fundamental biological units of culture must correspond to neuronal networks that function as nodes of semantic memory.

Theorists point out that memes which replicate the most effectively spread best, and some memes may replicate effectively even when they prove detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.[5]

In one set of experiments he asked religious people to write down on a piece of paper the meanings of the Ten Commandments.

Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[13]
[edit] Evolutionary influences on memes

Richard Dawkins noted the three conditions which must exist for evolution to occur:[14]

1. variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements
2. heredity o...

It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'."
2. ^ "meme" at The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition, 2000
3.

While the identification of memes as "units" conveys their nature to replicate as discrete, indivisible entities, it does not imply that thoughts somehow become quantized or that "atomic" ideas exist which cannot be dissected into smaller pieces.

Memetics attempts to apply conventional scientific methods (such as those used in population genetics and epidemiology) to explain existing patterns and transmission of cultural ideas.

Social contagions such as fads, hysterias and copycat suicides exemplify memes seen as the contagious imitation of ideas.

Deacon[19], Kull[20]) stating that the concept of meme is a primitivized concept of Sign.

Only the autistic subjects—who lack the degree of inferential capacity normally associated with aspects of theory of mind—came close to functioning as "meme machines".[24]

Principal criticisms[which?] of memetics include the claim that memetics ignores established advances in other fields of cultural study, such as sociology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, and social psychology.

Imitation counts as an important characteristic in the propagation of memes.

Categories: Memetics | Collective intelligence | Cultural anthropology | Evolutionary psychology | Futurology | Internet memes | Philosophy of mind | Units of morphological analysis | Units of information (cognitive processes) | Words coined in the 1970s | Concepts
Hidden categories: Articles that may contain original research from September 2008 | All articles that may contain original research | Articles lacking in-text citations from November 2009 | All articles lacking in-text citations ...

To emphasize commonality with genes, Dawkins coined the term "meme" by shortening "mimeme", which derives from the Greek word mimema ("something imitated").[1]

While the identification of memes as "units" conveys their nature to replicate as discrete, indivisible entities, it does not imply that thoughts somehow become quantized or that "atomic" ideas exist which cannot be dissected into smaller pieces.

* Blackmore, Susan J. (1999), The meme machine, Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press (published 1999-04-08), pp. 288, ISBN 0-19-850365-2 [trade paperback ISBN 0-9658817-8-4 (1999), ISBN 0-19-286212-X (2000)]
* Brodie, Richard (1996), Virus of the mind: the new science of the meme, Seattle, Wash: Integral Press, pp. 251, ISBN 0-9636001-1-7
* Dawkins, Richard (2004), A Devil's Chaplain : Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love, Boston: Mariner Books, pp. 263, ISB...

John S. Wilkins retained the notion of meme as a kernel of cultural imitation while emphasizing the meme's evolutionary aspect, defining the meme as "the least unit of sociocultural information relative to a selection process that has favourable or unfavourable selection bias that exceeds its endogenous tendency to change."[12]

To emphasize commonality with genes, Dawkins coined the term "meme" by shortening "mimeme", which derives from the Greek word mimema ("something imitated").[1]

John S. Wilkins retained the notion of meme as a kernel of cultural imitation while emphasizing the meme's evolutionary aspect, defining the meme as "the least unit of sociocultural information relative to a selection process that has favourable or unfavourable selection bias that exceeds its endogenous tendency to change."[12]

Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 368, ISBN 0192177737
* Dennett, Daniel C. (2006), Breaking the Spell, Viking (Penguin), ISBN 0-670-03472-X
* Dennett, Daniel (1991), Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., ISBN 0316180653
* Distin, Kate (2005), The selfish meme: a critical reassessment, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 238, ISBN 0-521-60627-6
* Farnish, Keith, "Time's Up! An Uncivilized Solution To A Global Crisis", Totnes: Green B...

Without such an explanation memes (seen in such terms) find themselves without reason, limited to cover all but science and memetics itself.[citation needed] Others have countered that meme-perspectives do not exclude talk of meaning, truth, or falsity as relevant.[25]
[edit] Religion
See also: Evolutionary psychology of religion

Although evolutionists[who?] had previously[when?] sought to understand and explain religion in terms of a cultural attribute which might conceivably confer...

(The etymology of the term relates to the Greek word μιμητισμός (pronounced /mɪmetɪsmos/) for "something imitated".)[2]

The longevity of religious memes improves with their documentation in revered religious texts.[8]

Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[13]
[edit] Evolutionary influences on memes

Richard Dawkins noted the three conditions which must exist for evolution to occur:[14]

1. variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements
2. heredity o...

Applications
* 7 Religion
* 8 Memetic explanations of racism
* 9 Internet culture
* 10 See also
* 11 Notes
* 12 References
* 13 External links

[edit] Origins and concepts

Historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from Greek mneme, “memory”), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the German Lamarckist biologist Richard Semon titled Die Mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen (loosely translat...

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success.

A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream"[1]) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.

In her book The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore regards religions as particularly tenacious memes.

While the identification of memes as "units" conveys their nature to replicate as discrete, indivisible entities, it does not imply that thoughts somehow become quantized or that "atomic" ideas exist which cannot be dissected into smaller pieces.

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 or neighbors).[9]

In their book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath describe characteristics of an idea that make it "sticky" (i.e. memorable or interesting).
[edit] Memes as discrete units

Richard Dawkins initially defined meme as a noun which "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation".[4]

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").

Categories: Memetics | Collective intelligence | Cultural anthropology | Evolutionary psychology | Futurology | Internet memes | Philosophy of mind | Units of morphological analysis | Units of information (cognitive processes) | Words coined in the 1970s | Concepts
Hidden categories: Articles that may contain original research from September 2008 | All articles that may contain original research | Articles lacking in-text citations from November 2009 | All articles lacking in-text citations ...

Social contagions such as fads, hysterias and copycat suicides exemplify memes seen as the contagious imitation of ideas.

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success.

Applications
* 7 Religion
* 8 Memetic explanations of racism
* 9 Internet culture
* 10 See also
* 11 Notes
* 12 References
* 13 External links

[edit] Origins and concepts

Historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from Greek mneme, “memory”), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the German Lamarckist biologist Richard Semon titled Die Mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen (loosely translat...

As factual criticism, he refers to the lack of a code script for memes, as the DNA is for genes, and to the fact that the meme mutation mechanism (i.e., an idea going from one brain to another) is too unstable (low replication accuracy and high mutation rate), which would render the evolutionary process chaotic.[18]

Cognitively transmitted memes depend heavily on a cluster of other ideas and cognitive traits already widely held in the population, and thus usually spread more passively than other forms of meme transmission.

They may also lie dormant for long periods of time.

Reflections from the perspective of the history and philosophy of evolutionary biology", Journal of Memetics 2, http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/
13.

Categories: Memetics | Collective intelligence | Cultural anthropology | Evolutionary psychology | Futurology | Internet memes | Philosophy of mind | Units of morphological analysis | Units of information (cognitive processes) | Words coined in the 1970s | Concepts
Hidden categories: Articles that may contain original research from September 2008 | All articles that may contain original research | Articles lacking in-text citations from November 2009 | All articles lacking in-text cit...

Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behaviour.

Cognitive: ideas perceived as cogent by most in the population who encounter them.

In 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.

As factual criticism, he refers to the lack of a code script for memes, as the DNA is for genes, and to the fact that the meme mutation mechanism (i.e., an idea going from one brain to another) is too unstable (low replication accuracy and high mutation rate), which would render the evolutionary process chaotic.[18]

Imitation often involves the copying of an observed behaviour of another individual, but memes may transmit from one individual to another through a copy recorded in an inanimate source, such as a book or a musical score.

Applications
* 7 Religion
* 8 Memetic explanations of racism
* 9 Internet culture
* 10 See also
* 11 Notes
* 12 References
* 13 External links

[edit] Origins and concepts

Historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from Greek mneme, “memory”), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the German Lamarckist biologist Richard Semon titled Die Mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen (loosely translat...

Categories: Memetics | Collective intelligence | Cultural anthropology | Evolutionary psychology | Futurology | Internet memes | Philosophy of mind | Units of morphological analysis | Units of information (cognitive processes) | Words coined in the 1970s | Concepts
Hidden categories: Articles that may contain original research from September 2008 | All articles that may contain original research | Articles lacking in-text citations from November 2009 | All articles lacking in-text citations ...

As Richard Dawkins has shown, systems of self-replicating ideas or memes can quickly accumulate their own agenda and behaviours.

Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[13]
[edit] Evolutionary influences on memes

Richard Dawkins noted the three conditions which must exist for evolution to occur:[14]

1. variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements
2. heredity o...

Efficiency of parenthood: an idea which increases the proportion of children who will adopt ideas of their parents.

In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. In the context of the exact sciences, memetics suffers in comparison because, unlike the idea of genes, memes do not necessarily have or need a concrete medium in order to transfer.
[edit] Transmission

Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means).

A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream"[1]) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.

Meme theory commonly cites memes grouped in memeplexes of religion as examples.[16]
[edit] Memetics
Main article: Memetics

The discipline of memetics, which dates from the mid 1980s, provides an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme.

In their book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath describe characteristics of an idea that make it "sticky" (i.e. memorable or interesting).
[edit] Memes as discrete units

Richard Dawkins initially defined meme as a noun which "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation".[4]

Clusters of memes, or memeplexes (also known as meme complexes or as memecomplexes), such as cultural or political doctrines and systems, may also play a part in the acceptance of new memes.

Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[13]
[edit] Evolutionary influences on memes

Richard Dawkins noted the three conditions which must exist for evolution to occur:[14]

1. variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements
2. heredity o...

The image of the crucifixion recurs in religious sacraments, and the proliferation of symbols of the cross (itself a meme) in homes and churches potently reinforces the wide array of Christian memes.[11]
[edit] Memetic explanations of racism

In Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology, Jack Balkin argued that memetic processes can explain many of the most familiar features of ideological thought.

Applications
* 7 Religion
* 8 Memetic explanations of racism
* 9 Internet culture
* 10 See also
* 11 Notes
* 12 References
* 13 External links

[edit] Origins and concepts

Historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from Greek mneme, “memory”), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the German Lamarckist biologist Richard Semon titled Die Mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen (loosely translatable as...

John S. Wilkins retained the notion of meme as a kernel of cultural imitation while emphasizing the meme's evolutionary aspect, defining the meme as "the least unit of sociocultural information relative to a selection process that has favourable or unfavourable selection bias that exceeds its endogenous tendency to change."[12]

Clusters of memes, or memeplexes (also known as meme complexes or as memecomplexes), such as cultural or political doctrines and systems, may also play a part in the acceptance of new memes.

Categories: Memetics | Collective intelligence | Cultural anthropology | Evolutionary psychology | Futurology | Internet memes | Philosophy of mind | Units of morphological analysis | Units of information (cognitive processes) | Words coined in the 1970s | Concepts
Hidden categories: Articles that may contain original research from September 2008 | All articles that may contain original research | Articles lacking in-text citations from November 2009 | All articles lacking in-text citations ...

For Dawkins, the meme exemplified another self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.

Observers distinguish the contagious imitation of memes from instinctively contagious phenomena such as yawning and laughing, which they consider innate (rather than socially learned) behaviors.[9]

Some denominations' promise of heaven to believers and threat of hell to non-believers provide a strong incentive for members to retain their belief (though not for nonbelievers to adopt it, as that promise and threat are among the tenets that they do not find credible in the first place[citation needed]).

Other examples of the varying degrees of criticism of memetics include the following:
[edit] Lack of philosophical appeal

In his chapter titled "Truth" published in the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, Dieter Lohmar questions the memeticists' reduction of the highly complex body of ideas (such as religion, politics, war, justice, and science itself) to a putatively one-dimensional series of memes.

Dawkins defined the meme as a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation, but later definitions would vary.

Luis Benitez-Bribiesca M.D., a critic of memetics, calls it "a pseudoscientific dogma" and "a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of conciousness and cultural evolution" among other things.

Contents
[hide]

* 1 Origins and concepts
* 2 Transmission
* 3 Memes as discrete units
* 4 Evolutionary influences on memes
* 5 Memetics
* 6 Criticism of meme theory
o 6.1

Lohmar argues that one cannot view memes through a microscope in the way one can detect genes.

Memeplexes comprise groups of memes that replicate together and coadapt.[8]

Some denominations' promise of heaven to believers and threat of hell to non-believers provide a strong incentive for members to retain their belief (though not for nonbelievers to adopt it, as that promise and threat are among the tenets that they do not find credible in the first place[citation needed]).

The longevity of religious memes improves with their documentation in revered religious texts.[8]

Cognitively transmitted memes depend heavily on a cluster of other ideas and cognitive traits already widely held in the population, and thus usually spread more passively than other forms of meme transmission.

* Atran, Scott (2001), "The Trouble with Memes", Human Nature 4 (12), http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/documents/disk0/00/00/01/23/ijn_00000123_00/ijn_00000123_00.doc

Efficiency of parenthood: an idea which increases the proportion of children who will adopt ideas of their parents.

Blackmore meets such criticism by stating that memes compare with genes in this respect: that while a gene has no particular size, nor can we ascribe every phenotypic feature directly to a particular gene, it has value because it encapsulates that key unit of inherited expression subject to evolutionary pressures.

The British scientist Richard Dawkins introduced the word "meme" in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a basis for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.

In 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.

For Dawkins, the meme exemplified another self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.

To illustrate, she notes evolution selects for the gene for features such as eye color; it does not select for the individual nucleotide in a strand of DNA. Memes play a comparable role in understanding the evolution of imitated behaviors.[8]

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Accordingly, in the broadest sense, the objects of copying are memes, whereas the objects of translation and interpretation are signs.

In their book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath describe characteristics of an idea that make it "sticky" (i.e. memorable or interesting).
[edit] Memes as discrete units

Richard Dawkins initially defined meme as a noun which "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation".[4]

Without such an explanation memes (seen in such terms) find themselves without reason, limited to cover all but science and memetics itself.[citation needed] Others have countered that meme-perspectives do not exclude talk of meaning, truth, or falsity as relevant.[25]
[edit] Religion
See also: Evolutionary psychology of religion

Although evolutionists[who?] had previously[when?] sought to understand and explain religion in terms of a cultural attribute which might conceivably confer biolog...

Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator.

Dawkins wrote 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.

In keeping with the thesis that in evolution one can regard organisms simply as suitable "hosts" for reproducing genes, Dawkins argues that one can view people as "hosts" for replicating memes.

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.[8]

Cognitive: ideas perceived as cogent by most in the population who encounter them.

Cultural memes will have the characteristic of Lamarckian inheritance when a host aspires to replicate the given meme through inference rather than by exactly copying it.

In other words, meme is a degenerate sign, which includes only its ability of being copied.

Observers distinguish the contagious imitation of memes from instinctively contagious phenomena such as yawning and laughing, which they consider innate (rather than socially learned) behaviors.[9]

Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[13]
[edit] Evolutionary influences on memes

Richard Dawkins noted the three conditions which must exist for evolution to occur:[14]

1. variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements
2. heredity or repli...

Children respond particularly receptively to the ideas of their parents, and thus ideas which directly or indirectly encourage a higher birthrate will replicate themselves at a higher rate than those that discourage higher birthrates.
2.

Contents
[hide]

* 1 Origins and concepts
* 2 Transmission
* 3 Memes as discrete units
* 4 Evolutionary influences on memes
* 5 Memetics
* 6 Criticism of meme theory
o 6.1

Meme theory commonly cites memes grouped in memeplexes of religion as examples.[16]
[edit] Memetics
Main article: Memetics

The discipline of memetics, which dates from the mid 1980s, provides an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme.

Only the autistic subjects—who lack the degree of inferential capacity normally associated with aspects of theory of mind—came close to functioning as "meme machines".[24]

Without such an explanation memes (seen in such terms) find themselves without reason, limited to cover all but science and memetics itself.[citation needed] Others have countered that meme-perspectives do not exclude talk of meaning, truth, or falsity as relevant.[25]
[edit] Religion
See also: Evolutionary psychology of religion

Although evolutionists[who?] had previously[when?] sought to understand and explain religion in terms of a cultural attribute which might conceivably confer...

While the identification of memes as "units" conveys their nature to replicate as discrete, indivisible entities, it does not imply that thoughts somehow become quantized or that "atomic" ideas exist which cannot be dissected into smaller pieces.

A field of study called memetics[6] arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model.

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
* Heylighen, Francis; Chielens, K. (2009), "Evolution of Culture, Memetics", in Meyers, B., Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science, Springer, http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/Memetics-Springer.pdf

The British scientist Richard Dawkins introduced the word "meme" in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a basis for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.

Imitation counts as an important characteristic in the propagation of memes.

One way the self organizing system can do this is by consuming human biological resources."
6.

To illustrate, she notes evolution selects for the gene for features such as eye color; it does not select for the individual nucleotide in a strand of DNA. Memes play a comparable role in understanding the evolution of imitated behaviors.[8]

Take for example the case of the transmission of a simple skill such as hammering a nail, a skill which a learner imitates from watching a demonstration without necessarily imitating every discrete movement modeled by the teacher in the demonstration, stroke for stroke.[15]

In one set of experiments he asked religious people to write down on a piece of paper the meanings of the Ten Commandments.

Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[13]
[edit] Evolutionary influences on memes

Richard Dawkins noted the three conditions which must exist for evolution to occur:[14]

1. variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements
2. heredity or repli...

The leveling-off of all such interesting "memes" down to some neutralized molecular "substance" such as "meme-substance" introduces a bias toward scientism and abandons the very essence of what makes ideas interesting, richly available, and worth studying.[21]
[edit] Applications

Opinions differ as to how best to apply the concept of memes within a "proper" disciplinary framework.

Aaron Lynch attributed the robustness of religious memes in human culture to the fact that such memes incorporate multiple modes of meme transmission.

Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that scholarship can examine memes empirically.

He hypothesised that one could view many cultural entities as replicators, and pointed to melodies, fashions and learned skills as examples.

Examples include Rickrolling, Pingas!, lolcats, "Leave Britney Alone", Keyboard Cat, and "All your base are belong to us".[27]
[edit] See also

* Cultural evolution
* Dual inheritance theory
* Electronic Revolution
* Evolutionary linguistics
* History of ideas
* Imitation
* Internet Meme
* Know Your Meme
* Memetics
* Memetic engineering
* Self-replication
* Sociocultural evolution
* Spiral Dynamics
* Viral marketing
* Viral v...

Others such as Bruce Edmonds and Robert Aunger have focused on the need to provide an empirical grounding for memetics to become a useful and respected scientific discipline.[22]

Examples include Rickrolling, Pingas!, lolcats, "Leave Britney Alone", Keyboard Cat, and "All your base are belong to us".[27]
[edit] See also

* Cultural evolution
* Dual inheritance theory
* Electronic Revolution
* Evolutionary linguistics
* History of ideas
* Imitation
* Internet Meme
* Know Your Meme
* Memetics
* Memetic engineering
* Self-replication
* Sociocultural evolution
* Spiral Dynamics
* Viral marketing
* Viral v...

Other examples of the varying degrees of criticism of memetics include the following:
[edit] Lack of philosophical appeal

In his chapter titled "Truth" published in the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, Dieter Lohmar questions the memeticists' reduction of the highly complex body of ideas (such as religion, politics, war, justice, and science itself) to a putatively one-dimensional series of memes.

Clusters of memes, or memeplexes (also known as meme complexes or as memecomplexes), such as cultural or political doctrines and systems, may also play a part in the acceptance of new memes.

^ Burgess, Jean (2008) (reprint, QUT Digital Repository ed.),

Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[13]
[edit] Evolutionary influences on memes

Richard Dawkins noted the three conditions which must exist for evolution to occur:[14]

1. variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements
2. heredity or repli...

Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator.

For example, religions that preach of the value of faith-based belief over evidence from everyday experience or reason inoculate societies against many of the most basic tools people commonly use to evaluate their ideas.

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.[8]

Categories: Memetics | Collective intelligence | Cultural anthropology | Evolutionary psychology | Futurology | Internet memes | Philosophy of mind | Units of morphological analysis | Units of information (cognitive processes) | Words coined in the 1970s | Concepts
Hidden categories: Articles that may contain original research from September 2008 | All articles that may contain original research | Articles lacking in-text citations from November 2009 | All articles lacking in-text citations ...

Applications
* 7 Religion
* 8 Memetic explanations of racism
* 9 Internet culture
* 10 See also
* 11 Notes
* 12 References
* 13 External links

[edit] Origins and concepts

Historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from Greek mneme, “memory”), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the German Lamarckist biologist Richard Semon titled Die Mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen (loosely translat...

Some denominations' promise of heaven to believers and threat of hell to non-believers provide a strong incentive for members to retain their belief (though not for nonbelievers to adopt it, as that promise and threat are among the tenets that they do not find credible in the first place[citation needed]).

These replicators respond to selective pressures that may or may not affect biological reproduction or survival.[4]

He sees memes as an abstraction and such a reduction as failing to produce greater understanding of those ideas.

In keeping with the thesis that in evolution one can regard organisms simply as suitable "hosts" for reproducing genes, Dawkins argues that one can view people as "hosts" for replicating memes.

Without such an explanation memes (seen in such terms) find themselves without reason, limited to cover all but science and memetics itself.[citation needed] Others have countered that meme-perspectives do not exclude talk of meaning, truth, or falsity as relevant.[25]
[edit] Religion
See also: Evolutionary psychology of religion

Although evolutionists[who?] had previously[when?] sought to understand and explain religion in terms of a cultural attribute which might conceivably confer biolog...

Many religions feature adversarial elements, punishing apostasy, for instance, or demonizing infidels.

Without such an explanation memes (seen in such terms) find themselves without reason, limited to cover all but science and memetics itself.[citation needed] Others have countered that meme-perspectives do not exclude talk of meaning, truth, or falsity as relevant.[25]
[edit] Religion
See also: Evolutionary psychology of religion

Although evolutionists[who?] had previously[when?] sought to understand and explain religion in terms of a cultural attribute which might conceivably confer...

A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream"[1]) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.

Strictly speaking, motivationally transmitted memes do not self-propagate, but this mode of transmission often occurs in association with memes self-replicated in the efficiency parental, proselytic and preservational modes.

The 1981 book Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process by Charles J. Lumsden and E. O. Wilson proposed the theory that genes and culture co-evolve, and that the fundamental biological units of culture must correspond to neuronal networks that function as nodes of semantic memory.

One way the self organizing system can do this is by consuming human biological resources."
6.

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success.

Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that scholarship can examine memes empirically.

Consequently, a successful meme may or may not need to provide any benefit to its host.[14]

According to the OED, the word mneme appears in English in 1921 in L. Simon's translation of Semon's book: The Mneme.[7]

Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate.

Some denominations' promise of heaven to believers and threat of hell to non-believers provide a strong incentive for members to retain their belief (though not for nonbelievers to adopt it, as that promise and threat are among the tenets that they do not find credible in the first place[citation needed]).

^ Dieter Lohmar - "Truth", in Lester Embree, Encyclopedia of phenomenology, Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997
22.

A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream"[1]) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.

Aaron Lynch described seven general patterns of meme transmission, or "thought contagion":[11]

1.

^ Kalevi Kull (2000), Copy versus translate, meme versus sign: development of biological textuality.

^ See for example John D. Gottsch: "Mutation, Selection, And Vertical Transmission Of Theistic Memes In Religious Canons" in Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2001.

Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that scholarship can examine memes empirically.

For example, a certain culture may develop unique designs and methods of tool-making that give it a competitive advantage over another culture.

Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[13]
[edit] Evolutionary influences on memes

Richard Dawkins noted the three conditions which must exist for evolution to occur:[14]

1. variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements
2. heredity o...

Children respond particularly receptively to the ideas of their parents, and thus ideas which directly or indirectly encourage a higher birthrate will replicate themselves at a higher rate than those that discourage higher birthrates.
2.

Meme theory commonly cites memes grouped in memeplexes of religion as examples.[16]
[edit] Memetics
Main article: Memetics

The discipline of memetics, which dates from the mid 1980s, provides an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme.

In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. In the context of the exact sciences, memetics suffers in comparison because, unlike the idea of genes, memes do not necessarily have or need a concrete medium in order to transfer.
[edit] Transmission

Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means).

Only the autistic subjects—who lack the degree of inferential capacity normally associated with aspects of theory of mind—came close to functioning as "meme machines".[24]

Without such an explanation memes (seen in such terms) find themselves without reason, limited to cover all but science and memetics itself.[citation needed] Others have countered that meme-perspectives do not exclude talk of meaning, truth, or falsity as relevant.[25]
[edit] Religion
See also: Evolutionary psychology of religion

Although evolutionists[who?] had previously[when?] sought to understand and explain religion in terms of a cultural attribute which might conceivably confer...

Adversative replication can give an advantage in meme transmission when the meme itself encourages aggression against other memes.
6.

This forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single unit of self-replicating information found on the self-replicating chromosome.

It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'."
2. ^ "meme" at The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition, 2000
3.

In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. In the context of the exact sciences, memetics suffers in comparison because, unlike the idea of genes, memes do not necessarily have or need a concrete medium in order to transfer.
[edit] Transmission

Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means).

Without such an explanation memes (seen in such terms) find themselves without reason, limited to cover all but science and memetics itself.[citation needed] Others have countered that meme-perspectives do not exclude talk of meaning, truth, or falsity as relevant.[25]
[edit] Religion
See also: Evolutionary psychology of religion

Although evolutionists[who?] had previously[when?] sought to understand and explain religion in terms of a cultural attribute which might conceivably confer biolog...

Blackmore meets such criticism by stating that memes compare with genes in this respect: that while a gene has no particular size, nor can we ascribe every phenotypic feature directly to a particular gene, it has value because it encapsulates that key unit of inherited expression subject to evolutionary pressures.

Categories: Memetics | Collective intelligence | Cultural anthropology | Evolutionary psychology | Futurology | Internet memes | Philosophy of mind | Units of morphological analysis | Units of information (cognitive processes) | Words coined in the 1970s | Concepts
Hidden categories: Articles that may contain original research from September 2008 | All articles that may contain original research | Articles lacking in-text citations from November 2009 | All articles lacking in-text cit...

Luis Benitez-Bribiesca M.D., a critic of memetics, calls it "a pseudoscientific dogma" and "a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of conciousness and cultural evolution" among other things.

Balkin describes racist beliefs as "fantasy" memes which become harmful or unjust "ideologies" when diverse peoples come together, as through trade or competition.[26]
[edit] Internet culture
Main article: Internet meme

The term "Internet meme" refers to a catchphrase or concept that spreads rapidly from person to person via the Internet, largely through Internet-based email, blogs, forums, Internet-based social networking sites and Internet-based instant messaging.

Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[13]
[edit] Evolutionary influences on memes

Richard Dawkins noted the three conditions which must exist for evolution to occur:[14]

1. variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements
2. heredity o...

To Balkin, whether memes become harmful or maladaptive depends on the environmental context in which they exist rather than in any special source or manner to their origination.

Examples include Rickrolling, Pingas!, lolcats, "Leave Britney Alone", Keyboard Cat, and "All your base are belong to us".[27]
[edit] See also

* Cultural evolution
* Dual inheritance theory
* Electronic Revolution
* Evolutionary linguistics
* History of ideas
* Imitation
* Internet Meme
* Know Your Meme
* Memetics
* Memetic engineering
* Self-replication
* Sociocultural evolution
* Spiral Dynamics
* Viral marketing
* Viral v...

Balkin describes racist beliefs as "fantasy" memes which become harmful or unjust "ideologies" when diverse peoples come together, as through trade or competition.[26]
[edit] Internet culture
Main article: Internet meme

The term "Internet meme" refers to a catchphrase or concept that spreads rapidly from person to person via the Internet, largely through Internet-based email, blogs, forums, Internet-based social networking sites and Internet-based instant messaging.

As factual criticism, he refers to the lack of a code script for memes, as the DNA is for genes, and to the fact that the meme mutation mechanism (i.e., an idea going from one brain to another) is too unstable (low replication accuracy and high mutation rate), which would render the evolutionary process chaotic.[18]

A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream"[1]) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.

Balkin describes racist beliefs as "fantasy" memes which become harmful or unjust "ideologies" when diverse peoples come together, as through trade or competition.[26]
[edit] Internet culture
Main article: Internet meme

The term "Internet meme" refers to a catchphrase or concept that spreads rapidly from person to person via the Internet, largely through Internet-based email, blogs, forums, Internet-based social networking sites and Internet-based instant messaging.

A field of study called memetics[6] arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model.

The image of the crucifixion recurs in religious sacraments, and the proliferation of symbols of the cross (itself a meme) in homes and churches potently reinforces the wide array of Christian memes.[11]
[edit] Memetic explanations of racism

In Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology, Jack Balkin argued that memetic processes can explain many of the most familiar features of ideological thought.

* Blackmore, Susan J. (1999), The meme machine, Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press (published 1999-04-08), pp. 288, ISBN 0-19-850365-2 [trade paperback ISBN 0-9658817-8-4 (1999), ISBN 0-19-286212-X (2000)]
* Brodie, Richard (1996), Virus of the mind: the new science of the meme, Seattle, Wash: Integral Press, pp. 251, ISBN 0-9636001-1-7
* Dawkins, Richard (2004), A Devil's Chaplain : Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love, Boston: Mariner Books, pp. 263, ISB...

Online version retrieved 2008-01-27.
17.

The leveling-off of all such interesting "memes" down to some neutralized molecular "substance" such as "meme-substance" introduces a bias toward scientism and abandons the very essence of what makes ideas interesting, richly available, and worth studying.[21]
[edit] Applications

Opinions differ as to how best to apply the concept of memes within a "proper" disciplinary framework.

Children respond particularly receptively to the ideas of their parents, and thus ideas which directly or indirectly encourage a higher birthrate will replicate themselves at a higher rate than those that discourage higher birthrates.
2.

Memetics thus remains a theory in its infancy, a protoscience to proponents, or a pseudoscience to some detractors[who?].
[edit] Criticism of meme theory

An 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.

Dawkins defined the meme as a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation, but later definitions would vary.

Applications
* 7 Religion
* 8 Memetic explanations of racism
* 9 Internet culture
* 10 See also
* 11 Notes
* 12 References
* 13 External links

[edit] Origins and concepts

Historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from Greek mneme, “memory”), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the German Lamarckist biologist Richard Semon titled Die Mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen (loosely translat...

Proponents of this view (such as Susan Blackmore and Daniel Dennett) argue that considering cultural developments from a meme's-eye view—as if memes themselves respond to pressure to maximise their own replication and survival—can lead to useful insights and yield valuable predictions into how culture develops over time.

Imitation often involves the copying of an observed behaviour of another individual, but memes may transmit from one individual to another through a copy recorded in an inanimate source, such as a book or a musical score.

John S. Wilkins retained the notion of meme as a kernel of cultural imitation while emphasizing the meme's evolutionary aspect, defining the meme as "the least unit of sociocultural information relative to a selection process that has favourable or unfavourable selection bias that exceeds its endogenous tendency to change."[12]

Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that scholarship can examine memes empirically.

As factual criticism, he refers to the lack of a code script for memes, as the DNA is for genes, and to the fact that the meme mutation mechanism (i.e., an idea going from one brain to another) is too unstable (low replication accuracy and high mutation rate), which would render the evolutionary process chaotic.[18]

In keeping with the thesis that in evolution one can regard organisms simply as suitable "hosts" for reproducing genes, Dawkins argues that one can view people as "hosts" for replicating memes.

Examples include Rickrolling, Pingas!, lolcats, "Leave Britney Alone", Keyboard Cat, and "All your base are belong to us".[27]
[edit] See also

* Cultural evolution
* Dual inheritance theory
* Electronic Revolution
* Evolutionary linguistics
* History of ideas
* Imitation
* Internet Meme
* Know Your Meme
* Memetics
* Memetic engineering
* Self-replication
* Sociocultural evolution
* Spiral Dynamics
* Viral marketing
* Viral v...

Categories: Memetics | Collective intelligence | Cultural anthropology | Evolutionary psychology | Futurology | Internet memes | Philosophy of mind | Units of morphological analysis | Units of information (cognitive processes) | Words coined in the 1970s | Concepts
Hidden categories: Articles that may contain original research from September 2008 | All articles that may contain original research | Articles lacking in-text citations from November 2009 | All articles lacking in-text citations ...

Aaron Lynch described seven general patterns of meme transmission, or "thought contagion":[11]

1.

The meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless if that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme.

Children respond particularly receptively to the ideas of their parents, and thus ideas which directly or indirectly encourage a higher birthrate will replicate themselves at a higher rate than those that discourage higher birthrates.
2.

* Heylighen, Francis, (1992) : "Selfish Memes and the Evolution of Cooperation", Journal of Ideas vol. 2, no. 4, pp, 77–84.

A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream"[1]) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.

To illustrate, she notes evolution selects for the gene for features such as eye color; it does not select for the individual nucleotide in a strand of DNA. Memes play a comparable role in understanding the evolution of imitated behaviors.[8]

A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with "cream"[1]) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.

One way the self organizing system can do this is by consuming human biological resources."
6.

* Jan, Steven: The Memetics of Music: A Neo-Darwinian View of Musical Structure and Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)
* Kelly, Kevin (1994), Out of control: the new biology of machines, social systems and the economic world, Boston: Addison-Wesley, pp. 360, ISBN 0-201-48340-8
* Lynch, Aaron (1996), Thought contagion: how belief spreads through society, New York: BasicBooks, pp. 208, ISBN 0-465-08467-2
* Post, Stephen Garrard; Underwood, Lynn G; Schloss, Jeffrey P Garrard (2002...

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").

Examples include Rickrolling, Pingas!, lolcats, "Leave Britney Alone", Keyboard Cat, and "All your base are belong to us".[27]
[edit] See also

* Cultural evolution
* Dual inheritance theory
* Electronic Revolution
* Evolutionary linguistics
* History of ideas
* Imitation
* Internet Meme
* Know Your Meme
* Memetics
* Memetic engineering
* Self-replication
* Sociocultural evolution
* Spiral Dynamics
* Viral marketing
* Viral v...

In their book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath describe characteristics of an idea that make it "sticky" (i.e. memorable or interesting).
[edit] Memes as discrete units

Richard Dawkins initially defined meme as a noun which "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation".[4]

* Blackmore, Susan J. (1999), The meme machine, Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press (published 1999-04-08), pp. 288, ISBN 0-19-850365-2 [trade paperback ISBN 0-9658817-8-4 (1999), ISBN 0-19-286212-X (2000)]
* Brodie, Richard (1996), Virus of the mind: the new science of the meme, Seattle, Wash: Integral Press, pp. 251, ISBN 0-9636001-1-7
* Dawkins, Richard (2004), A Devil's Chaplain : Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love, Boston: Mariner Books, pp. 263, ISB...

Reflections from the perspective of the history and philosophy of evolutionary biology", Journal of Memetics 2, http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/
13.

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success.

^ Dieter Lohmar - "Truth", in Lester Embree, Encyclopedia of phenomenology, Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997
22.

Principal criticisms[which?] of memetics include the claim that memetics ignores established advances in other fields of cultural study, such as sociology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, and social psychology.

Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[13]
[edit] Evolutionary influences on memes

Richard Dawkins noted the three conditions which must exist for evolution to occur:[14]

1. variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements
2. heredity or repli...

Susan Blackmore writes that melodies from Beethoven's symphonies are commonly used to illustrate the difficulty involved in delimiting memes as discrete units.

Categories: Memetics | Collective intelligence | Cultural anthropology | Evolutionary psychology | Futurology | Internet memes | Philosophy of mind | Units of morphological analysis | Units of information (cognitive processes) | Words coined in the 1970s | Concepts
Hidden categories: Articles that may contain original research from September 2008 | All articles that may contain original research | Articles lacking in-text citations from November 2009 | All articles lacking in-text citations ...

Children respond particularly receptively to the ideas of their parents, and thus ideas which directly or indirectly encourage a higher birthrate will replicate themselves at a higher rate than those that discourage higher birthrates.
2.

The Semiotic Review of Books 10(3).
20.

Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[13]
[edit] Evolutionary influences on memes

Richard Dawkins noted the three conditions which must exist for evolution to occur:[14]

1. variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements
2. heredity or repli...

Toward a theory of metasystem transitions, (Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, New York) (special issue of World Futures: the journal of general evolution, vol. 45, p. 155-171).

In 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.

Take for example the case of the transmission of a simple skill such as hammering a nail, a skill which a learner imitates from watching a demonstration without necessarily imitating every discrete movement modeled by the teacher in the demonstration, stroke for stroke.[15]

The leveling-off of all such interesting "memes" down to some neutralized molecular "substance" such as "meme-substance" introduces a bias toward scientism and abandons the very essence of what makes ideas interesting, richly available, and worth studying.[21]
[edit] Applications

Opinions differ as to how best to apply the concept of memes within a "proper" disciplinary framework.

Without such an explanation memes (seen in such terms) find themselves without reason, limited to cover all but science and memetics itself.[citation needed] Others have countered that meme-perspectives do not exclude talk of meaning, truth, or falsity as relevant.[25]
[edit] Religion
See also: Evolutionary psychology of religion

Although evolutionists[who?] had previously[when?] sought to understand and explain religion in terms of a cultural attribute which might conceivably confer biolog...

Categories: Memetics | Collective intelligence | Cultural anthropology | Evolutionary psychology | Futurology | Internet memes | Philosophy of mind | Units of morphological analysis | Units of information (cognitive processes) | Words coined in the 1970s | Concepts
Hidden categories: Articles that may contain original research from September 2008 | All articles that may contain original research | Articles lacking in-text citations from November 2009 | All articles lacking in-text cit...

Examples include Rickrolling, Pingas!, lolcats, "Leave Britney Alone", Keyboard Cat, and "All your base are belong to us".[27]
[edit] See also

* Cultural evolution
* Dual inheritance theory
* Electronic Revolution
* Evolutionary linguistics
* History of ideas
* Imitation
* Internet Meme
* Know Your Meme
* Memetics
* Memetic engineering
* Self-replication
* Sociocultural evolution
* Spiral Dynamics
* Viral marketing
* Viral v...

By linking altruism with religious affiliation, religious memes can proliferate more quickly because people perceive that they can reap societal as well as personal rewards.

In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. In the context of the exact sciences, memetics suffers in comparison because, unlike the idea of genes, memes do not necessarily have or need a concrete medium in order to transfer.
[edit] Transmission

Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means).

In one set of experiments he asked religious people to write down on a piece of paper the meanings of the Ten Commandments.

In Thought Contagion Lynch identifies the memes of transmission in Christianity as especially powerful in scope.

The image of the crucifixion recurs in religious sacraments, and the proliferation of symbols of the cross (itself a meme) in homes and churches potently reinforces the wide array of Christian memes.[11]
[edit] Memetic explanations of racism

In Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology, Jack Balkin argued that memetic processes can explain many of the most familiar features of ideological thought.

This issue 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.

* Aunger, Robert (2000), Darwinizing culture: the status of memetics as a science, Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-263244-2
* Aunger, Robert (2002), The electric meme: a new theory of how we think, New York: Free Press, ISBN 0-7432-0150-7
* Balkin, J. M. (1998), Cultural software: a theory of ideology, New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-07288-0
* Bloom, Howard S. (1997), The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the For...

The British scientist Richard Dawkins introduced the word "meme" in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a basis for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.

Applications
* 7 Religion
* 8 Memetic explanations of racism
* 9 Internet culture
* 10 See also
* 11 Notes
* 12 References
* 13 External links

[edit] Origins and concepts

Historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from Greek mneme, “memory”), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the German Lamarckist biologist Richard Semon titled Die Mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen (loosely translat...

The British scientist Richard Dawkins introduced the word "meme" in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a basis for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.

Proponents of this view (such as Susan Blackmore and Daniel Dennett) argue that considering cultural developments from a meme's-eye view—as if memes themselves respond to pressure to maximise their own replication and survival—can lead to useful insights and yield valuable predictions into how culture develops over time.

Categories: Memetics | Collective intelligence | Cultural anthropology | Evolutionary psychology | Futurology | Internet memes | Philosophy of mind | Units of morphological analysis | Units of information (cognitive processes) | Words coined in the 1970s | Concepts
Hidden categories: Articles that may contain original research from September 2008 | All articles that may contain original research | Articles lacking in-text citations from November 2009 | All articles lacking in-text citations ...

* Dawkins' speech on the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins 2006
* "Evolution and Memes: The human brain as a selective imitation device": article by Susan Blackmore.

Believers view the conversion of non-believers both as a religious duty and as an act of altruism.

John S. Wilkins retained the notion of meme as a kernel of cultural imitation while emphasizing the meme's evolutionary aspect, defining the meme as "the least unit of sociocultural information relative to a selection process that has favourable or unfavourable selection bias that exceeds its endogenous tendency to change."[12]

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.

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.[8]

Other examples of the varying degrees of criticism of memetics include the following:
[edit] Lack of philosophical appeal

In his chapter titled "Truth" published in the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, Dieter Lohmar questions the memeticists' reduction of the highly complex body of ideas (such as religion, politics, war, justice, and science itself) to a putatively one-dimensional series of memes.

As factual criticism, he refers to the lack of a code script for memes, as the DNA is for genes, and to the fact that the meme mutation mechanism (i.e., an idea going from one brain to another) is too unstable (low replication accuracy and high mutation rate), which would render the evolutionary process chaotic.[18]

Imitation often involves the copying of an observed behaviour of another individual, but memes may transmit from one individual to another through a copy recorded in an inanimate source, such as a book or a musical score.

Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time.

Some critics[who?] have seen the inability to pin an idea or cultural feature to its key units as an insurmountable problem for memetics.

Categories: Memetics | Collective intelligence | Cultural anthropology | Evolutionary psychology | Futurology | Internet memes | Philosophy of mind | Units of morphological analysis | Units of information (cognitive processes) | Words coined in the 1970s | Concepts
Hidden categories: Articles that may contain original research from September 2008 | All articles that may contain original research | Articles lacking in-text citations from November 2009 | All articles lacking in-text citations ...

A third approach, described[by whom?] as "radical memetics", seeks to place memes at the centre of a materialistic theory of mind and of personal identity.[23]

* Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.

Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behaviour.

To Balkin, whether memes become harmful or maladaptive depends on the environmental context in which they exist rather than in any special source or manner to their origination.

For example, a certain culture may develop unique designs and methods of tool-making that give it a competitive advantage over another culture.

To illustrate, she notes evolution selects for the gene for features such as eye color; it does not select for the individual nucleotide in a strand of DNA. Memes play a comparable role in understanding the evolution of imitated behaviors.[8]

Blackmore meets such criticism by stating that memes compare with genes in this respect: that while a gene has no particular size, nor can we ascribe every phenotypic feature directly to a particular gene, it has value because it encapsulates that key unit of inherited expression subject to evolutionary pressures.

Dawkins wrote 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.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 368, ISBN 0192177737
* Dennett, Daniel C. (2006), Breaking the Spell, Viking (Penguin), ISBN 0-670-03472-X
* Dennett, Daniel (1991), Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., ISBN 0316180653
* Distin, Kate (2005), The selfish meme: a critical reassessment, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 238, ISBN 0-521-60627-6
* Farnish, Keith, "Time's Up! An Uncivilized Solution To A Global Crisis", Totnes: Green B...

Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.[3]

Ideas which encourage longevity in their hosts, or leave their hosts particularly resistant to abandoning or replacing these ideas, enhance the preservability of memes and afford protection from the competition or proselytism of other memes.
5.

In their book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath describe characteristics of an idea that make it "sticky" (i.e. memorable or interesting).
[edit] Memes as discrete units

Richard Dawkins initially defined meme as a noun which "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation".[4]

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.[8]

In their book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath describe characteristics of an idea that make it "sticky" (i.e. memorable or interesting).
[edit] Memes as discrete units

Richard Dawkins initially defined meme as a noun which "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation".[4]

Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that scholarship can examine memes empirically.

* Poulshock, Joseph (2002), "The Problem and Potential of Memetics", Journal of Psychology and Theology (Rosemead School of Psychology, Gale Group (2004)): 68+
* Sterelny, Kim; Griffiths, Paul E. (1999).

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.[8]

* Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.

The meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless if that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme.

Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

* Jan, Steven: The Memetics of Music: A Neo-Darwinian View of Musical Structure and Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)
* Kelly, Kevin (1994), Out of control: the new biology of machines, social systems and the economic world, Boston: Addison-Wesley, pp. 360, ISBN 0-201-48340-8
* Lynch, Aaron (1996), Thought contagion: how belief spreads through society, New York: BasicBooks, pp. 208, ISBN 0-465-08467-2
* Post, Stephen Garrard; Underwood, Lynn G; Schloss, Jeffrey P Garrard (2002...

Balkin describes racist beliefs as "fantasy" memes which become harmful or unjust "ideologies" when diverse peoples come together, as through trade or competition.[26]
[edit] Internet culture
Main article: Internet meme

The term "Internet meme" refers to a catchphrase or concept that spreads rapidly from person to person via the Internet, largely through Internet-based email, blogs, forums, Internet-based social networking sites and Internet-based instant messaging.

The meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless if that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme.

Ideas which encourage longevity in their hosts, or leave their hosts particularly resistant to abandoning or replacing these ideas, enhance the preservability of memes and afford protection from the competition or proselytism of other memes.
5.

If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word meme.

Toward a theory of metasystem transitions, (Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, New York) (special issue of World Futures: the journal of general evolution, vol. 45, p. 155-171).

In 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.

The highly interconnected, multi-layering of 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".

Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[13]
[edit] Evolutionary influences on memes

Richard Dawkins noted the three conditions which must exist for evolution to occur:[14]

1. variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements
2. heredity o...

Strictly speaking, motivationally transmitted memes do not self-propagate, but this mode of transmission often occurs in association with memes self-replicated in the efficiency parental, proselytic and preservational modes.

Motivational: ideas that people adopt because they perceive some self-interest in adopting them.

Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behaviour.

^ See for example John D. Gottsch: "Mutation, Selection, And Vertical Transmission Of Theistic Memes In Religious Canons" in Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2001.

Luis Benitez-Bribiesca M.D., a critic of memetics, calls it "a pseudoscientific dogma" and "a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of conciousness and cultural evolution" among other things.

Luis Benitez-Bribiesca M.D., a critic of memetics, calls it "a pseudoscientific dogma" and "a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of conciousness and cultural evolution" among other things.

For example, a certain culture may develop unique designs and methods of tool-making that give it a competitive advantage over another culture.

A third approach, described[by whom?] as "radical memetics", seeks to place memes at the centre of a materialistic theory of mind and of personal identity.[23]

* Aunger, Robert (2000), Darwinizing culture: the status of memetics as a science, Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-263244-2
* Aunger, Robert (2002), The electric meme: a new theory of how we think, New York: Free Press, ISBN 0-7432-0150-7
* Balkin, J. M. (1998), Cultural software: a theory of ideology, New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-07288-0
* Bloom, Howard S. (1997), The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the For...

Memetics attempts to apply conventional scientific methods (such as those used in population genetics and epidemiology) to explain existing patterns and transmission of cultural ideas.

This issue 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.

Despite the subjects' own expectations of consensus, interpretations of the commandments showed wide ranges of variation, with little evidence of consensus.

Imitation often involves the copying of an observed behaviour of another individual, but memes may transmit from one individual to another through a copy recorded in an inanimate source, such as a book or a musical score.

^ See for example John D. Gottsch: "Mutation, Selection, And Vertical Transmission Of Theistic Memes In Religious Canons" in Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2001.

Proponents of this view (such as Susan Blackmore and Daniel Dennett) argue that considering cultural developments from a meme's-eye view—as if memes themselves respond to pressure to maximise their own replication and survival—can lead to useful insights and yield valuable predictions into how culture develops over time.

While the identification of memes as "units" conveys their nature to replicate as discrete, indivisible entities, it does not imply that thoughts somehow become quantized or that "atomic" ideas exist which cannot be dissected into smaller pieces.

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").

Applications
* 7 Religion
* 8 Memetic explanations of racism
* 9 Internet culture
* 10 See also
* 11 Notes
* 12 References
* 13 External links

[edit] Origins and concepts

Historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from Greek mneme, “memory”), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the German Lamarckist biologist Richard Semon titled Die Mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen (loosely translat...

Ideas which encourage longevity in their hosts, or leave their hosts particularly resistant to abandoning or replacing these ideas, enhance the preservability of memes and afford protection from the competition or proselytism of other memes.
5.

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.

Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[13]
[edit] Evolutionary influences on memes

Richard Dawkins noted the three conditions which must exist for evolution to occur:[14]

1. variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements
2. heredity o...

Cultural separatism exemplifies one practice in which one can expect a higher rate of meme-replication — because the meme for separation creates a barrier from exposure to competing ideas.
3.

Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catch-phrases, beliefs (notably religious beliefs), clothing fashion, and the technology of building arches.[4]

A meme could consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech in which that word first occurred.

This issue 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.

The leveling-off of all such interesting "memes" down to some neutralized molecular "substance" such as "meme-substance" introduces a bias toward scientism and abandons the very essence of what makes ideas interesting, richly available, and worth studying.[21]
[edit] Applications

Opinions differ as to how best to apply the concept of memes within a "proper" disciplinary framework.

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.[8]

For example, religions that preach of the value of faith-based belief over evidence from everyday experience or reason inoculate societies against many of the most basic tools people commonly use to evaluate their ideas.

As factual criticism, he refers to the lack of a code script for memes, as the DNA is for genes, and to the fact that the meme mutation mechanism (i.e., an idea going from one brain to another) is too unstable (low replication accuracy and high mutation rate), which would render the evolutionary process chaotic.[18]

He sees memes as an abstraction and such a reduction as failing to produce greater understanding of those ideas.

Applications
* 7 Religion
* 8 Memetic explanations of racism
* 9 Internet culture
* 10 See also
* 11 Notes
* 12 References
* 13 External links

[edit] Origins and concepts

Historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from Greek mneme, “memory”), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the German Lamarckist biologist Richard Semon titled Die Mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen (loosely translat...

* Poulshock, Joseph (2002), "The Problem and Potential of Memetics", Journal of Psychology and Theology (Rosemead School of Psychology, Gale Group (2004)): 68+
* Sterelny, Kim; Griffiths, Paul E. (1999).

For Dawkins, the meme exemplified another self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.

A field of study called memetics[6] arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model.

The meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless if that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme.

Lack of philosophical appeal
o 6.2

Others such as Bruce Edmonds and Robert Aunger have focused on the need to provide an empirical grounding for memetics to become a useful and respected scientific discipline.[22]

Observers distinguish the contagious imitation of memes from instinctively contagious phenomena such as yawning and laughing, which they consider innate (rather than socially learned) behaviors.[9]

The longevity of religious memes improves with their documentation in revered religious texts.[8]

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.

Dawkins wrote 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.

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.[8]

For example, a certain culture may develop unique designs and methods of tool-making that give it a competitive advantage over another culture.

In Thought Contagion Lynch identifies the memes of transmission in Christianity as especially powerful in scope.

Lohmar argues that one cannot view memes through a microscope in the way one can detect genes.

A third approach, described[by whom?] as "radical memetics", seeks to place memes at the centre of a materialistic theory of mind and of personal identity.[23]

Blackmore meets such criticism by stating that memes compare with genes in this respect: that while a gene has no particular size, nor can we ascribe every phenotypic feature directly to a particular gene, it has value because it encapsulates that key unit of inherited expression subject to evolutionary pressures.

Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[13]
[edit] Evolutionary influences on memes

Richard Dawkins noted the three conditions which must exist for evolution to occur:[14]

1. variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements
2. heredity o...

In gods we trust: the evolutionary landscape of religion.

For example, a certain culture may develop unique designs and methods of tool-making that give it a competitive advantage over another culture.

As factual criticism, he refers to the lack of a code script for memes, as the DNA is for genes, and to the fact that the meme mutation mechanism (i.e., an idea going from one brain to another) is too unstable (low replication accuracy and high mutation rate), which would render the evolutionary process chaotic.[18]

Memetics thus remains a theory in its infancy, a protoscience to proponents, or a pseudoscience to some detractors[who?].
[edit] Criticism of meme theory

An 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.

Without such an explanation memes (seen in such terms) find themselves without reason, limited to cover all but science and memetics itself.[citation needed] Others have countered that meme-perspectives do not exclude talk of meaning, truth, or falsity as relevant.[25]
[edit] Religion
See also: Evolutionary psychology of religion

Although evolutionists[who?] had previously[when?] sought to understand and explain religion in terms of a cultural attribute which might conceivably confer...

Cognitive: ideas perceived as cogent by most in the population who encounter them.

Autistics showed a significant tendency to closely paraphrase and repeat content from the original statement (for example: "Don't cut flowers before they bloom").

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.

Dawkins wrote 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.

I assign no higher motive to a cultural entity than the primitive drive to reproduce itself and modify its environment to aid its spread.

Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, pp. 108–109, http://eprints.qut.edu.au/18431/1/18431.pdf

[edit] References

* Atran, Scott (2002).

* Wilson, Edward O. (1998), Consilience: the unity of knowledge, New York: Knopf, pp. 352, ISBN 0-679-45077-7

[edit] External links
Search Wiktionary Look up meme in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catch-phrases, beliefs (notably religious beliefs), clothing fashion, and the technology of building arches.[4]

* Dawkins' speech on the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins 2006
* "Evolution and Memes: The human brain as a selective imitation device": article by Susan Blackmore.

Some denominations' promise of heaven to believers and threat of hell to non-believers provide a strong incentive for members to retain their belief (though not for nonbelievers to adopt it, as that promise and threat are among the tenets that they do not find credible in the first place[citation needed]).

In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. In the context of the exact sciences, memetics suffers in comparison because, unlike the idea of genes, memes do not necessarily have or need a concrete medium in order to transfer.
[edit] Transmission

Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means).

Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success.

The 1981 book Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process by Charles J. Lumsden and E. O. Wilson proposed the theory that genes and culture co-evolve, and that the fundamental biological units of culture must correspond to neuronal networks that function as nodes of semantic memory.

While the identification of memes as "units" conveys their nature to replicate as discrete, indivisible entities, it does not imply that thoughts somehow become quantized or that "atomic" ideas exist which cannot be dissected into smaller pieces.

Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[13]
[edit] Evolutionary influences on memes

Richard Dawkins noted the three conditions which must exist for evolution to occur:[14]

1. variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements
2. heredity or repli...

* Dawkins' speech on the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins 2006
* "Evolution and Memes: The human brain as a selective imitation device": article by Susan Blackmore.

Blackmore meets such criticism by stating that memes compare with genes in this respect: that while a gene has no particular size, nor can we ascribe every phenotypic feature directly to a particular gene, it has value because it encapsulates that key unit of inherited expression subject to evolutionary pressures.

Theorists point out that memes which replicate the most effectively spread best, and some memes may replicate effectively even when they prove detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.[5]

Dawkins states that he did not know of the "mneme"[citation needed], and said that he wanted "a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'".[1]

In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. In the context of the exact sciences, memetics suffers in comparison because, unlike the idea of genes, memes do not necessarily have or need a concrete medium in order to transfer.
[edit] Transmission

Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means).

Despite the subjects' own expectations of consensus, interpretations of the commandments showed wide ranges of variation, with little evidence of consensus.

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.