From: Brent Scofield (brent@atomicphotography.com)
Date: Mon 08 Sep 2003 - 23:59:44 GMT
A while back I was taking an undergraduate anthropology course on the
emergence of civilization, or more accurately, the emergence of complex
societies. For my term paper I decided to try to approach the emergence and
development of complex societies from a memetic perspective. It is of course
a huge, and exteremely general topic, so my paper just touched on some basic
applications of memetic theory without going into any real detail or depth.
But still, the application of memetics to the topic seemed to fit so well,
and I was hoping this list would be a good place to develop the idea
further, or even better, learn about other, more rigourous, applications of
mememtics to this same topic.
With the increase in population density, due to the agrarian revolution, the
horizontal transmission of information became increasingly possible,
resulting in a much greater potential set of hosts for any given meme. And
with that, it became a possibilty (maybe an inevitability), for "meme
strongholds" to emerge. A meme stronghold, as I think of it, is a group of
people that materially benefits from a meme or memeplex, and therefore acts
as a buffer against such basic and inevitable things as drought and famine.
It is easy to imagine that, before extensive horizontal transimission, and
before the development of meme strongholds, natural disaster could easily
wipe out memes completely, since the meme-hosts themselves would be wiped
out. The development of a "meme stronghold" class would have allowed for the
evolution of a whole new group of memes and memeplexes that perpetuate
themselves through two main mechanisms: 1. protecting their stronghold
against material hardship and memetic competition and 2. encouraging
horizontal transmission, particlarly from the stronghold outwards.
Almost all of the developments that are considered features of complex
societies, such as increased population density, writing systems, monumental
architecture, the development of full time "priest" classes, etc., are all
clear tools for increasing horizontal transimission (within a generation
from person to person) of ideas as opposed to vertical transmission (from
parent to offspring) of ideas.
It is also interesting that this development of meme strongholds and the
increase in horizontal transmission could result in memes that were more
destructive to their hosts than would have been possible before. Without a
meme stronghold, a meme that causes harm to the host is at risk of dying
with the host, or simply being rejected in favour of memes that are more
personally beneficial. But with a meme stronghold, all that is important to
the meme is that the stronghold itself survives to spread memes again
another day. Those outside of the stronghold could live very difficult
lives, could be sacrificed in warfare to protect or strengthen the
meme-stronghold, etc., because their survival is only neccessary in support
of the stronghold.
Well, that is a semi-random smattering of some if the ideas that came out of
my simplistic application of memetics to a very large topic. I am really
curious about what others think about the idea of meme-strongholds as
catalyst for, if not the main fuel for, the development of civilization and
the incredible increase in the means for horizontal transmission in the last
few millenia. What meme could be more self-perpetuating than one that
encourages communication or increases the means for communication? Was
memetic evolution the main motiviator of the development of civilization?
Brent
===============================================================
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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon 08 Sep 2003 - 23:59:12 GMT