From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Tue 14 Jan 2003 - 01:41:30 GMT
Memetics comes from "meme" (which rhymes with "cream"), a word
coined in purposeful analogy to gene by Richard Dawkins in his 1976
book, _The Selfish Gene_. To understand memes, you must have a good
understanding of the modern concepts of evolution, and this is a good
source. In its last chapter, memes were defined as replicating
information patterns that use minds to get themselves copied much as a
virus uses cells to get itself copied. (Dawkins credits several
others for developing the concepts, especially the anthropologist F.
T. Cloak.) Like genes, memes are pure information.*
[*The essence of a gene is in its information. It is still a gene
"for hemoglobin" or "for waltzing behavior in mice" whether the
sequence is coded in DNA, printed on paper, or is written on
magnetic tape.]
They must be
perceived indirectly, most often by their effect on behavior or by
material objects that result from behavior. Humans are not the only
creatures that pass memes about. Bird songs that are learned (and
subject to variation) and the songs of whales are also replicating
information pattern that fit the model of a meme. So is the
"termiteing" behavior that chimps pass from generation to generation.
"Meme" is similar to "idea," but not all ideas are memes. A
passing idea which you do not communicate to others, or one which
fails to take root in others, falls short of being a meme. The
important part of the "meme about memes" is that memes are subject to
adaptive evolutionary forces very similar to those that select for
genes. That is, their variation is subject to selection in the
environment provided by human minds, communication channels, and the
vast collection of cooperating and competing memes that make up human
culture. The analogy is remarkably close. For example, genes in cold
viruses that cause sneezes by irritating noses spread themselves by
this route to new hosts and become more common in the gene pool of a
cold virus. Memes cause those they have successfully infected to
spread the meme by both direct methods (proselytizing) and indirect
methods (such as writing). Such memes become more common in the
culture pool.
The entire topic would be academic except that there are two
levels of evolution (genes and memes) involved and the memetic level
is only loosely coupled to the genetic. Memes which override genetic
survival, such as those which induce young Lebanese Shiites to blow
themselves "into the next world" from the front seat of a truck loaded
with high explosives, or induce untrained Iranians to volunteer to
charge Iraqi machine guns, or the WW II Kamikaze "social movement" in
Japan, are all too well known. I have proposed the term "memeoid" for
people whose behavior is so strongly influenced by a replicating
information pattern (meme) that their survival becomes inconsequential
in their own minds.
2003 comment. I could elaborate, or use different examples, but this seems
good enough for a working definition.
Keith Henson
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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