Meme

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, however; for example, William S. Burroughs asserted that "Language is a virus". Memes can represent parts of ideas, languages, tunes, designs, skills, moral and esthetic 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.

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.

Table of contents

1 Do cultures evolve?

2 Examples of memes

3 Evolution of memes: non-natural selection

4 The form taken by memes in the brain

5 Biological analogies: memetic virus exchange?

6 The "be happy" and "make others happy" memes

7 Can memes be resisted?

8 Memetics

9 Further reading

10 See also

Do cultures evolve?

Dawkins observed that cultures can evolve in much the same way populations of organisms do, by passing ideas from one generation to the next, some of which may enhance or detract from the survival of the person holding them, thereby affecting which of those ideas continue to be passed on to future generations. For example, early cultures may have had different designs and methods for building tools. The culture with the more effective method may well have prospered while others suffered, leading to its method being adopted by a higher proportion of the population as time passed. Each tool design thus acts somewhat similarly to a biological gene; some populations have it and some don't, 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 a bird that learns how to sing by imitating its parents.

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.

Unlike genes whose success is determined by how good at surviving the organism that carries them is, memes' success depends on more subtle means (such as criticism, persuasion, and fashion/peer pressure) that have not yet been widely investigated. Some common techniques by which successful memes are propagated include:

Demonstrating that an idea or technique is beneficial. (eg. a carpenter shows an apprentice that two bits of wood will stick together when a hammer and nail is used to join them)
Identifying an issue or a problem of interest which cannot be solved (e.g. what, if anything, happens after death) and proposing a solution (e.g., you go to heaven or hell). The solution can't be definitively proved wrong, and as such is relatively safe and fit for further propagation.
Frightening those who would prefer not to propagate the meme (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).
Requiring the individuals who employ the meme to be kind to other people and to spend a lot of time thinking and talking about it (e.g., a priest doing little else besides trying to spread his religion).

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

Examples of memes

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

All sorts of religions and beliefs.
Earworms; A song that you can't stop humming or thinking. "It's a Small World After All" is commonly used as an example.
Chain letters; "You must send this message to five other people, or something bad will happen to you."
"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.
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.

Evolution of memes: non-natural selection

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 lamarckian. Folk tales and myths, for example, 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 actor 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.

The form taken by memes in the brain

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.

Biological analogies: memetic virus exchange?

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.

The "be happy" and "make others happy" memes

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.

Can memes be resisted?

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

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