Meme: Difference between revisions

A meme (rhymes with "dream") is a unit of information that replicates from brains or retention systems, such as books, to other brains or retention systems. In more specific terms, a meme is a self-propagating unit of cultural evolution, analogous to the gene (the unit of genetics). The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in his controversial book The Selfish Gene. The concept predates the coining of the term; for example, William S. Burroughs asserted that "Language is a virus". Memes can represent parts of ideas, languages, tunes, designs, skills, moral and aesthetic values and anything else that is commonly learned and passed on to others as a unit. The study of evolutionary models of information transfer is called memetics.

Memetic and genetic evolution cannot happen without mutation. Mutation produces the essential variations, of which the better at replicating, by definition, become more common and have a greater chance of replicating again. Unlike genetic evolution however, memetic evolution has no seperate underlying genotype. If a mouse loses its tail or a bodybuilder lifts weights, for example, the dna information in their genotype will remain unchanged, and when replicating again will not pass on these acquired characteristics. In memetics however, the phenotype serves as the genotype and therefore changes in the former accumulate and get passed on as they replicate. Therefore memetics is said to be lamarckian, which is somewhat ironic given that a great deal of effort and debate have gone into proving that genetic evolution isn't. It is probable that mutation directed language to culturally evolve from a handful of primitive syllables into the modern wide array of dialects, let alone the wide array of symbolic meaning within individual dialects. Further mutations of language are writing, braile, sign language, etc. Even the oft-cited All your base are belong to us meme produced variations such as "all your vote are belong to us". Other lines in the originating videogame's dialogue such as "Somebody set up us the bomb" were also replicated on the internet, but with less success. Search engines can be used as an imperfect measure of the popularity of various memetic phrases.

In casual use, the term meme is sometimes used to mean any piece of information passed from one mind to another. This is much closer to the analogy of "language as a virus" than it is to Dawkins's analogy of memes as replicating behaviors.

"The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

See Memetic lexicon for an overview of words used in memetics.

Dawkins observed that cultures can evolve in much the same way that populations of organisms evolve. Various ideas are passed from one generation to the next which may either enhance or detract from the survival of the people who obtain those ideas. This process affects which of those ideas that will continue to be passed on to future generations. For example, a certain culture may have their own unique designs and methods of tool building, however the culture with the more effective methods will most likely prosper over the other culture. This leads to those methods being adopted by a higher proportion of the population as time passes. Each tool design thus acts somewhat similar to a biological gene in that some populations have it and others do not, and the presence of the design in future generations is directly affected by the meme's function.

A key characteristic of a meme is that it is propagated by imitation. When imitation first evolved in humans, it proved to be a good trick that increased an individual's ability to reproduce genetically. Perhaps sexual selection of the best imitators further drove the genetic increase in the ability of brains to imitate well. To imitate basically means to take in information from the environment to the brain through any sense organ. The environment can be inanimate such as a book, or more typically another human from which information of a certain behavior is taken in and then performed. Inanimate sources of information have been termed 'retention systems'. Because memes propagate by imitation from one individual to another, they could not exist without brains that are powerful enough to assess the key aspects of the behavior to be imitated (what to copy and why) as well as its potential benefits. Memes (or behaviors acquired and propagated by imitation) have been observed in just a few species on Earth including hominids, dolphins, and birds that learn how to sing by imitating their parents. It is arguable, however, that there exist examples of less complex memes in other species - for example, imitative behaviour has been artificially induced among cephalopods and rats.

Both genes and memes can survive much longer than the individual organisms that carry them. A successful gene (such as a gene for powerful teeth in a population of lions) can remain unchanged in the gene pool for hundreds of thousands of years. A successful meme can propagate itself from one individual to another long after it has first appeared.

The following statements are crudely stated versions of some common memes:

• Technology is a major example, such as cars, paperclips etc. Technology clearly demonstrates mutation as well which is essential for memetic (or genetic) progress to be made. There have been many paperclip designs throughout history, for example with varying degrees of longevity, fecundity and copying fidelity (ie. memetic "success")
• Earworms; A song that you can't stop humming or thinking. "It's a Small World After All" is commonly used as an example.
• Jokes; Or at least jokes that are popularly considered to be funny
• Proverbs and aphorisms; "You can't keep a good man meme down"
• Nursery rhymes; are propagated from parent to child over many generations, sometimes with associated actions and movements.
• Epic poems; used to be important memes for preserving oral history, although they have largely been killed off by writing.
• Chain letters; "You must send this message to five other people, or something bad will happen to you."
• All sorts of religions and beliefs.
• Conspiracy theories
• "Statement X is true. Statement X tells us: If you believe X, you will go to heaven. If you do not believe X, you will go to hell. Therefore, it is your moral duty to convince everyone of the truth of X." (some skeptics believe this explains most organized religion: note that Statement X can be anything, so long as it contains this hook)
• "I am a lucky person. Here are some stories of my luck. If you believe in good luck, you can become lucky like me." (and its obverse: see luck).
• All your base are belong to us
• Something exciting that you have to tell your friends.
• Susan Blackmore theorized that a "self" is merely a collection of memetic stories which she calls the selfplex.
• The concept of memes is itself a meme. Even the idea that the concepts of memes is itself a meme has become a widely spread meme. However, the idea that the idea that the concepts of memes is itself a meme, is not yet particularly common as a meme.
• Movies are very memetic given their mass replication, causing people to imitate a huge number of things they observe in them such as saying "You can't handle the truth" from A Few Good Men or "Alllllllrighty then" from Ace Ventura (starring Jim Carrey), even if they have not seen the movies themselves.
• Longstanding political memes that suppress natural democratic notions and activity, such as "mob rule" and "republic, not a democracy".
• All sorts of group-based biases, from antisemitism and racism to cargo cults.

The Memetic Lexicon is a list of attributes concerning memes that was compiled by Glenn Grant under a "share-alike" license. The thoughtful examples it offers help focus the concept, for a reader for whom "meme" is unfamiliar. The Lexicon has been circulating since the early 90's, and is currently on its 3rd incarnation.

• A Memetic Lexicon

Evolution requires not only inheritance and natural selection but also mutation, and memes clearly have this property as well. Ideas that get passed on may undergo changes that accumulate over time. These changes in the "phenotype" (the information in brains or retention systems) are passed on however. In other words, unlike genetic evolution, they are both Darwinian and Lamarckian. For example, Folk tales and myths are often embellished in the retelling to make them more memorable-- and therefore more likely to be retold again. More modern examples can be found in the various urban legends and hoaxes that circulate on the Internet such as the Goodtimes virus warning.

What distinguishes ideas as memes from other ideas that get passed from person to person is that the likelihood of a meme being passed on is affected by some property of the meme itself, rather than just by the nature of the people passing it on. For example, tool designs can clearly affect the efficacy of a tool independently of the habits of the different people using them. Legends and myths, for example, often teach a moral lesson or explain a mystery, so they are more likely to be retold to serve different speakers' purposes than other similar stories without those elements.

How "natural" is this type of selection? Perhaps as natural as sexual attraction or ethical habits. The relationship of the meme to other ideas of evolution, e.g. those that separate ecological, sexual, ethical and moral factors and reserve no special or separate role for "culture" beyond these, seems to be as "pretender to the throne" - pretending to explain these more specific ideas of evolution and culture - but without any model to test. This causes quite a few scientists and others to scoff at culture as any kind of factor in human life.

A famous observation of this type was that of Margaret Thatcher, who bluntly stated "society does not exist" - evidently she saw "it" as a set of survival, seduction and moral choice factors specific to individuals, couples and families, and not as a unified "culture" or "society" in any sense.

A gene or a meme's success is determined only by the number of copies (and where the copies reside) that are extant. There is a strong correlation between genes that do well and genes that have a positive effect on the organism which contains those genes. And if we restrict attention to memes that are normally interpreted as statements of fact then there is a correlation between those memes that do well and those that are true. However there are genes and memes whose success is due to other factors. Similarly there is a correlation between memes of a technological/economic nature that are succesful and those that are helpful to the economy.

A gene's success in a body may be due to its attempt to bypass the normal sexual lottery by making itself present in more than 50% of zygotes in an organism. Alternatively some genes are selected for by sexual selection. Hence the evolution of genes is influenced by many factors other than just the success of the species as a whole. Similarly the evolutionary pressures on memes include much more than just truth and economic success. The evolutionary pressures include the following:

1. Experience: If a meme does not correlate with an individual's experience then they are less likely to believe that meme.
2. Happiness: If a meme makes people feel happier then they are more likely to believe it (exceptions include cynical people (although you could argue that having something to be cynical about makes some people happier)).
3. Fear: If a meme constitutes a threat people may be frightened into believing it (e.g. If you do/do not do this, you will burn in hell) and compensating those who do (e.g. Do this and you will go to heaven after you die).
4. Censorship: If a big and powerful organisation penalizes people who express belief in a particular meme or burns books containing that meme then that meme is put at a selective disadvantage. (Note that there is the meme "Censorship is wrong". It is interesting to speculate that this meme may have prospered by increasing the wealth of those nations that enforced it thus increasing the influence of that meme itself).
5. Economics: If a meme tends to be held by people or organisations that have economic influence then the meme is likely to benefit from a greater audience. If a meme tends to increase the riches of an individual holding it then that meme is likely to spread because of the former reason given. Such memes would include "Hard work is good." and "Put number 1 first.".

A meme, like a gene, does not purposely do or want anything- it either gets replicated or not.

In 1981 biologists Charles J. Lumsden and Edward Osborne Wilson published a theory of gene-culture coevolution in the book Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process. They pointed out that the fundamental biological units of culture must correspond to neuronal networks that function as nodes of semantic memory. Wilson later adopted the term "meme" as the best existing name for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance and elaborated upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences in his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

In much the same way that the selfish gene concept can be used as a point of view from which to better understand and reason about biological evolution, the meme concept can be used to better understand some otherwise puzzling aspects of human culture (and learned behaviors of other animals as well). However, if "better" is not good enough to test empirically, the question will remain whether the meme concept is good enough for science. Memetics is thus a science in its infancy. However it is definitely a protoscience rather than a pseudoscience. Is the meme idea itself simply embedding itself in culture like other bad ideas?

A controversial application of this "selfish meme" parallel is the idea that certain collections of memes can act as "memetic viruses": collections of ideas that behave like independent life forms, and continue to get passed on even at the expense of their hosts simply because they are good at getting passed on. It has been suggested that evangelical religions and cults behave this way; by including the act of passing on their beliefs as a moral virtue, other beliefs of the religion also get passed along even if they aren't particularly valuable to the believer.

Others note that the wide prevalence of human adoption of religious ideas proves that they must have some ecological, sexual, ethical or moral value. For example, most religions urge peace and cooperation among their followers ("Thou shalt not kill"), which may tend to promote the biological survival of social groups that carry these memes. Certainly religious promoters claim such value for following their rules or principles - but how is that related to what they feel is divine?

There is a tendency in memetics to disparage the religious meme. It is surprising to many memetics advocates to learn of meme-like concepts described long ago, which are prevalent in Sufi teaching. For an introduction to the muwakkals, the Eastern memes, read The Music of Life, Pir Hazrat Inayat Khan, Omega Uniform Edition, 2nd edition, 1993, trade paperback: 353 pages, ISBN 093087238X. Muwakkals are considered separate beings, elementals, that make up human thought.

Some spiritual practices, e.g. Buddhism, clearly promote ecological and moral goals recognizable to most people, e.g. The Noble Eightfold Path emphasizes limited consumption, reduced cruelty, no delegation of violence or participation in violent systems, and a withdrawal from sexual and ethical processes that have no clear ecological or moral value to the practitioner - regardless of the value they may have to others.

The Judeo-Christian-Islamic "Western" religions, however, focus more on devotion to a transcendant deity and moral codes of behavior, including social and ethical codes affecting every aspect of life from selfless love to commerce to sexual behavior. Some believe they promote ecological destruction and self-alienation - the traditional "East versus West" debate in religion. People are urged to devote themselves to the needs of others.

The contrast between "be happy" and "make others happy", although not as stark in practice or theory as the traditional debate suggests, may satisfy constraints of different ecological or sexual norms in some non-obvious way. But it seems entirely unlikely that "they aren't particularly valuable to the believer." At least, the majority of people on Earth clearly don't think so.

Karl Popper advocated this in the strongest possible terms: "the survival value of intelligence is that it allows us to extinct a bad idea, before the idea extincts us."

Resistance to science and technology has been a common meme (or anti-meme or un-meme) guiding human cultural and cognitive evolution away from disastrous paths - for instance the Japanese during the Tokugawa period stockpiled but did not use guns, just as the US and USSR stockpiled but did not use nuclear weapons in the Cold War period. Ignorance has been in some cultures considered a virtue - in particular ignorance of certain temptations that the culture believes would be disastrous if pursued by many individuals.

The Internet, perhaps the ultimate meme vector, seems to be hosting both sides of this debate. Although it would seem to a naive observer that no adult user of the Internet could oppose its use by other adults, that does in fact happen, based on any number of criteria from ethics to intent to ability to resist hacking or pornography. Can we restrict the most dangerous memes to the wisest people? And who are "we" to decide?

Principia Cybernetica holds a lexicon of memetics concepts, comprising a list of different types of memes. It also refers to an essay by Jaron Lanier: The ideology of cybernetic totalist intellectuals which is very strongly critical of "meme totalists" who assert memes over bodies.

Memetics is the formal study of memes. Memetics can currently be regarded as either a field of sociology, or a protoscience in its own right. It originated when Richard Dawkins reduced the process of biological genetic evolution to the most fundamental unit, the replicator (or gene). In a search for other things that might be classifiable as replicators on earth, Dawkins suggested information and ideas in brains, or culture (perhaps software is another replicator that evolution may eventually build grand things with).

Memetics applies concepts taken from the theory of evolution (especially population genetics) to human culture. It tries to explain many very controversial subjects, like religions and political systems, using mathematical models.

Many thoughtful people wonder if the analogy of gene to culture will hold up and how the similarity would be tested.

Memetics must be distinguished from sociobiology. In sociobiology the evolving entities are genes, while in memetics they are memes. Sociobiology is concerned with the biological basis of human behaviours, while memetics treats humans as products not only of biological evolution, but of cultural evolution also.

Memetic association is the discovery that memes herd. For example, the meme for bluejeans includes memes for trouser flies, riveted clothing, blue dye, cotton clothing, belt loops, and double-sewn seams.

Memetic drift is the process of an idea or meme changing as it is transferred from one person to another. Very few memes show strong memetic inertia which is the characteristic of a meme to be expressed in the same way and to have the same impact, regardless of which person is receiving or transmitting the idea. Memetic drift increases when the meme is transmitted by an awkward way of expressing the idea, whilst memetic inertia is strengthened when the form of expression rhymes or uses other mnemonic devices to preserve the memory of the meme prior to its transmittal. The article on Murphy's law shows one example of memetic drift.

Much of memetic terminology is created by prepending 'mem(e)-' to an existing, usually biological, term, or by putting 'mem(e)' in place of 'gen(e)' in various terms. Examples include: meme pool, memotype, memetic engineer, meme-complex.

See Memetic lexicon

• The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore, Oxford University Press, 1999, hardcover ISBN 0198503652, trade paperback ISBN 0965881784, May 2000, ISBN 019286212X
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, Oxford University Press, 1976, 2nd edition, December 1989, hardcover, 352 pages, ISBN 0192177737; April 1992, ISBN 019857519X; trade paperback, September 1990, 352 pages, ISBN 0192860925
• Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society by Aaron Lynch, Basic Books, 1999, ISBN 0465084672
• Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by Richard Brodie, Integral Pr, September 1995, 251 Pages, ISBN 0963600117
• The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History by Howard Bloom, Atlantic Monthly Press, February 1997, 480 pages, ISBN 0871136643
• The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think by Robert Aunger, Free Press, 2002, hardcover ISBN 0743201507
• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, Bantam Doubleday Dell, reprint, 2000, trade paperback: 440 pages, ISBN 0553380958 (uses the theme of memetic replication in his SF book)
• The Ideology of Cybernetic Totalist Intellectuals an essay by Jaron Lanier which is very strongly critical of "meme totalists" who assert memes over bodies.
• Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
• Principia Cybernetica holds a lexicon of memetics concepts, comprising a list of different types of memes.
• A list of memetics publications on the web
• Cultural Selection by Agner Fog. Dordrecht: Kluwer 1999. ISBN 0-7923-5579-2.
• The Masculist Meme by Alan Carr. Lulu Publishing, Content .58184 Examines political correctness as a mind virus.
• Memeiosis by Steven Ericsson-Zenith - a formal characterization of Memes.
• The story of the computer game Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty centres on the concept that history itself is memetic; only the most important events are preserved. The mysterious central character fears that an uncensored internet will preserve the trite and banal indefinitely.

• Chain letter
• Copycat
• Exploding sheep
• Meme pool
• Neuroeconomics
• Paradigm shift
• Self-replication
• Spamming
• Urban myth

• Meme Designed to Help Make Blogs More Visible! (GoMeme 4.0)
• Friday Foofah
• Meme List