This thread is the off-shoot of a series of PMs between inamilist and myself. We're both, for whatever reason, enamored with memes.
If anyone doesn't know what they are...look it up ( ). Nah, a brief synopsis is below:
Memes are units of cultural inheritance. Ideas. A song is a meme, the belief in God is a meme, the color blue is a meme, and the idea that Jordan is a better player than Wilt is a meme (and vice-versa). Etc. etc. etc.
Memes act as replicators, much as genes act as replicators within our DNA, which replicate themselves through procreation. But memes replicate in our minds. If someone didn't know what a meme was, then read this, the "meme" meme would be transferred to them. It is replicated within them.
No one knows exactly what a meme looks like, because it would be a series of neural firings, and wouldn't be exactly the same thing in each person (maybe I think of something slightly different than you when we think of the color blue, for example). So copying fidelity isn't as high as with genes (meaning, they aren't as perfect a copy of the original) but it is usually close enough that memes can spread and be roughly the same idea.
Catchy memes (A Beatles song, a well-developed scientific theory) will outlast less catchy ones, and replicate more numerously. The memes "compete" (unconsciously, of course) for attention and adherence within human hosts.
Memeplexes form when memes "cooperate" with each other. Religion is a good example of memes making one another stronger in a memeplex. A meme for Roman Catholicism would have many smaller interrelated memes. Belief in God, the Trinity, free will, Mary's virginity, the literal truth of the resurrection, etc. These form a cohesive unit, and the result is a strongly-held meme/belief.
A brief aside: words like "cooperate" and "compete" imply sentience and intent, which memes have neither, but the words are useful to describe their unconscious behavior. They act as though they are competing and/or cooperating, though they aren't doing so with any awareness or intent of performing such acts.
Meme theory extends beyond this, and has implications throughout our culture. It can be a fascinating study of a form of evolution. Evolution is used loosely, because it isn't exactly the same as genetic evolution, though both can be said to undergo pruning via a naturally selective process.
...
Anyway, this is the meme discussion thread. I'll get the ball rolling shortly with some interesting ideas/questions inamilist threw my way recently, but for now will just let this go wherever.
Dawkins wrote a book a few years back dedicated to discussing memes. And yeah, it's basically just a mental hand-me-down. I think that its just another word for teaching, and not really a complex theory.
Yes, memes can evolve, but the word "evolve" has to be recontextualized as change over time to a replicating entity. We generally think of evolution in such strict DNA/gene terms that it's hard to adjust the definition slightly for memes.
Many are co-adaptive, meaning that they enhance one another and change one another over time. Think of lions hunting gazelle. The fastest lions tend to survive because they can track down their prey. Evolution moves toward faster lions due to natural selection. Same with gazelle, whose speed allows them to elude the lions. Over successive generations, both species become faster. Co-adaptive.
The best meme example I can think of is musical genres. The meme for "rap" (and various sub-memes of the genre) was influenced by earlier musical genres, and has changed over the last few decades due to musical influences from competing genres. The rap meme, either collectively in society or individually within a person, is different today than it was in 1985. But it remains a powerful meme, apparently, due to the success and survival of the genre.
...
As for the book Quiero's alluding to, I honestly don't know it. Dawkins coined the term and is credited with "inventing" the meme, but others have actually done more treatment to the theory of them than Dawkins. Dan Dennett and Susan Blackmore come to mind as leading meme theorists, both of whom have dedicated novels to it. The most Dawkins has ever added to his initial theory (which was all of 1 chapter in his first published book) is a couple short essays. He's actually been accused of abandoning the theory after starting the craze. He insists this isn't so, but also admits that others have taken the idea far further than he originally imagined.
Something like that. I actually wanted to gauge interest before posting long conversations between inamilist and I. Better to have some general interest and knowledge before jumping off the philosophical deep end.
memes dont attract me much. its just complicating a simple thing. we shud infact study how all enviornmental factors not related to genetic evolution directly, survive in the minds of individuals and society as a whole and why they do so. firing of specific neurones is vastly oversimplifying the issue.
the premise is correct but whether the action is or not...there is a small part in either this weeks new scientist or bbc focus about social memory
one such idea is that phobias are handed down in this way and that particular one stemmed from the plague when many houses were deserted and when repopulated were covered in cobwebs
apparently
another fictional aspect i thought was intriguing was in JG Ballard's "the drowned world" which essentially was about global warming (due to solar factors) making the area around the equator uninhabitable and making areas such as london (where the book is set) revert to prehistoric jungle...and because species re-evolved or devolved to species which were long extint....then humans also started to devolve...and biological/genetic memory which had been stored in the human brain over millions of years of evolution started to resurface and make some people become more animalistic not in appearance but psychologically
__________________
Last edited by jaden101 on Dec 21st, 2007 at 11:47 AM
You took one aspect of memes (the physical manifestation) and acted like that's all there is to it. For something to survive in the mind, it is a meme...saying that "environmental factors" survive in the mind, as something separate from our thoughts/memes, is a gross misunderstanding of the mind.
You also, simultaneously, accused memes of complicating a simple thing and vastly oversimplifying the issue. The post is barely coherent.
Most phobias are genetic, such as avoiding spiders, which is many parts of the world would have survival implications. They can be transferred as memes as well, just like children learn not to touch fire from their parents....a phobia of something (we'll stick with spiders, for example) could be a meme becoming too well-embedded in a mind, thus impairing other functions through fear.
It actually touches on something I brought up in the conspiracy forum, of memes that become so firmly rooted as to bat aside rational thought/action by their very nature. A profound fear-meme would impair actions that might otherwise ensure survival, and is an example of a meme becoming very much like a virus. It survives very strongly, maybe even replicates itself in others better, but at the expense of the host body.
not really. i say, if your gonna go beyond genes, then also go beyond the basic battle of ideas inside humans, for i do no think that it is majorly responsible, collectively, in changing enviornment and deciding which ideologies survive and which do not, take the example of today when things are forced onto your mind more than they are judged unbiasly by minds and the best collectively chosen. if i have one problem with hardline evolutionists it this, " they forget too quickly that evolution is random" and think that whatever{behaviour, traits, culture etc etc} survives has evolutionary importance. which isnt true, very few has, specially such dynamic phenomenon as cultures/thought pattern etc, which change over much much smaller periods of time than evolution works.
also, the same idea often has radically different nural actitivty in different individuals.
it complicates the simple concepts of persistance of ideas and thought patterns{not necessarily neural patterns} , but oversimplifies the issue of evolution of the collective humans race as being dependant on little more than the persistance and competition and ultimately selection of neural processes as being responsible for it. when infact a lot more things are just as responsible and there is more to ideas than neural processes.
For the last sentence, I stated as much in my opening post. It's not a new insight, and doesn't invalidate meme theory. It just means their copying fidelity is less precise than genes.
For the former, memes ARE the study of culture and society. The very definition I used includes culture as a primary force. So I'm not sure how you decided that I'm only talking about electrical impulses in the brain, but, um, I'm not. What's the point if all we're talking about is bio-chemical reactions? There isn't one, unless we extend those effects to their phenotypes in society.
And you're very wrong on two other counts. One, that cultural change (you termed it evolution, which is probably not the right label for such change, but meh) is slower that genetic evolution. Given the amount of change we see in the past few thousand years, century, decade, etc. it's literally impossible to say we change more slowly than genetic evolution (which takes hundreds of thousands of years in most species to create noticeable and/or important change).
And second, that evolution is random. Gene/meme mutations are random. Natural selection of them is not. In fact, it is anything but random. Beyond that, meme evolution is dependent on humans transferring them to others via speech, internet, media, etc. And humans are fully aware of their existence, and able to act on their thoughts. Which is why a popular meme spreads like a plague, rather than the snails-pace of genes moving through the gene pool. Not random. Naturally selective, which is a specific process for naturally selecting memes or genes.
^ i still maintain that meme theory is often used by hardline evolutionists to find an evolutionary{i.e. biological surviveability of species} basis to all sociological and macro level phenomenon which to me, just is not true.
KMC Community Forums
). Nah, a brief synopsis is below:
Dec 21st, 2007 12:04 AM
I play guitar, sing & write songs. Listen to my music 
