Concept
Memetics
Overview
Memetics, or the study of memes, is an emerging discipline in cultural evolution, based on the idea that culture can be reduced to the study of cultural units, called memes: ideas, behaviors, beliefs, and expressions that spread from person to person in a culture through imitation. The term "meme" was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, to illustrate the principle that he later called "Universal Darwinism". All evolutionary processes depend on information being copied, varied, and selected, a process also known as variation with selective retention. The conveyor of the information being copied is known as the replicator, with the gene functioning as the replicator in biological evolution. Dawkins proposed that the same process drives cultural evolution, and he called this second replicator the "meme", citing examples such as musical tunes, catchphrases, fashions, and technologies. Like genes, memes are selfish replicators and have causal efficacy; in other words, their properties influence their chances of being copied and passed on. Some succeed because they are valuable or useful to their human hosts while others are more like viruses.
Just as genes can work together to form co-adapted gene complexes, so form groups of memes acting together co-adapted meme complexes or memeplexes. Memeplexes include (among many other things) languages, traditions, scientific theories, financial institutions, and religions. Dawkins famously referred to religions as "viruses of the mind".
Among proponents of memetics are psychologist Susan Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine, who argues that when our ancestors began imitating behaviours, they let loose a second replicator and co-evolved to become the "meme machines" that copy, vary, and select memes in culture. Philosopher Daniel Dennett develops memetics extensively, notably in his books Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and From Bacteria to Bach and Back. He describes the units of memes as "the smallest elements that replicate themselves with reliability and fecundity", and claims that "Human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes." In The Beginning of Infinity, the physicist David Deutsch contrasts static societies that depend on anti-rational memes, which suppress innovation and creativity, with dynamic societies based on rational memes that encourage enlightenment values, scientific curiosity, and progress.
Criticisms of memetics include claims that memes do not exist, that the analogy with genes is false, that the units cannot be specified, that culture does not evolve through imitation, and that the sources of variation are intelligently designed rather than random. Critics of memetics include biologist Stephen Jay Gould who calls memetics a "meaningless metaphor". Philosopher Dan Sperber argues against memetics as a viable approach to cultural evolution because cultural items are not directly copied or imitated but are reproduced. Anthropologist Robert Boyd and biologist Peter Richerson work within the alternative, and more mainstream, field of cultural evolution theory and gene-culture coevolution. Dual inheritance theory has much in common with memetics but rejects the idea that memes are replicators. From this perspective, memetics is seen as just one of several approaches to cultural evolution and one that is generally considered less useful than the alternatives of gene-culture coevolution or dual inheritance theory. The main difference is that dual inheritance theory ultimately depends on biological advantage to genes, whereas memetics treats memes as a second replicator in its own right. Memetics also extends to the analysis of Internet culture, including Internet memes.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Thus quitting their mask or their rags, they only return to a subtler theatre, where however they can be as sensible and well regulated as in the greater.... Thus not only the souls, but even the animals are neither generable nor perishable: they are only developed, enveloped, re-clothed, unclothed,--transformed. The souls never altogether quit their body, and do not pass from one body into another body which is…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Memetics is.
[The theory of] _Pre-established Harmony_ may proceed in two different ways. It regards every organised being as generated by one of like kind, either as an _educt_ or a _product_. The system which regards generations as mere educts is called the theory of _individual preformation_ or the theory of _evolution_: that which regards them as products is entitled the system of _epigenesis_. This latter may also be…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Memetics is.
If these homogeneous products of nature--it is understood for all this discussion that they are organic--are not related through descent, they or their ancestors, then "where the thread of descent breaks" they must have been placed in the world by a separate act of creation, and this again requires a creator, what we call "deism."
Friedrich Engels, Landmarks of Scientific Socialism
States what Memetics is.
Related ideas
- Cult
- Belief
- Greek language
- Neologism
- Consciousness Explained
- Language
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Information
- Culture
- Mutation
- Ontology
- Pseudoscience
- Religion
- Richard Dawkins
- University of Cambridge
- Scientific method
- Stephen Jay Gould
- Semiotics
- Tradition
- Age of Enlightenment
- Memory
- Causality
- Complex system
- Quantitative research
Place in the tradition
Part of Symbiosism.