meme

meme
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"meme" ( /ˈmiːm/[1]) is a relatively newly-coined term that identifies ideas, behaviors or styles that spread from person to person within a culture.[2] the concept comes from an analogy: as genes transmit biological information, memes can be said to transmit ideas and belief information.
a meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.[3]
the word "meme" is a shortening (modeled on "gene") of mimeme (from ancient greek μίμημα greek pronunciation: [míːmɛːma] mimēma, "something imitated", from μιμεῖσθαι mimeisthai, "to imitate", from μῖμος mimos "mime")[4] and it was coined by the british evolutionary biologist richard dawkins in the selfish gene (1976)[1][5] as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catch-phrases, fashion and the technology of building arches.[6]
advocates of the meme idea say that memes may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution. memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition and inheritance, each of which influence a meme's reproductive success.
memes spread through the behaviors that they generate in their hosts. memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread and (for better or for worse) mutate. memes that replicate most effectively enjoy more success. some memes may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.[7]
a field of study called memetics[8] arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model. criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that scholarship can examine memes empirically. some commentators[who?] question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units.
contents [hide]
1 history
1.1 origins
2 concept
3 transmission
4 memes as discrete units
5 evolutionary influences on memes
6 memetics
7 criticism of meme theory
7.1 potential lack of philosophical depth
7.2 applications
8 religion
9 memetic explanations of racism
10 internet culture
11 meme maps
12 see also
13 notes
14 references
15 external links
[edit]history

[edit]origins
max stirner's 1844 the ego and its own puts forth the idea that the individual is dominated by illusory concepts ('fixed ideas' or 'spooks'), which can be shaken and undermined by each individual, though he does not use the term meme for this. he offers examples such as nationalism and religion.
historically, the notion of a unit of social evolution, and a similar term (from greek mneme, “memory”), first appeared in 1904 in a work by the german lamarckist biologist richard semon titled die mnemischen empfindungen in ihren beziehungen zu den originalempfindungen (loosely translatable as “memory-feelings in relation to original feelings”). according to the oed, the word mneme appears in english in 1921 in l. simon's translation of semon's book: the mneme.[9]
laurent noted the use of the term mneme in maurice maeterlinck's the life of the white ant (1926), and has highlighted similarities to dawkins' concept.[10]
the analogy between culturally transmitted information and genetically transmitted information was perceived clearly enough by luigi luca cavalli-sforza and marcus w. feldman to allow them to formulate and analyze quantitative models of cultural transmission and selection. they published a series of papers beginning in 1973.[11]
the word meme originated with dawkins' 1976 book the selfish gene. to emphasize commonality with genes, dawkins coined the term "meme" by shortening "mimeme", which derives from the greek word mimema ("something imitated").[1]
dawkins states that he did not know of the "mneme",[citation needed] and said that he wanted "a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'".[1] dawkins wrote that evolution depended not on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmission – in the case of biological evolution, the gene. for dawkins, the meme exemplified another self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.
[edit]concept

dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator. he hypothesised that one could view many cultural entities as replicators, and pointed to melodies, fashions and learned skills as examples. memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behaviour. because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time. dawkins likened the process by which memes survive and change through the evolution of culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution.[6]
dawkins defined the meme as a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation and replication, but later definitions would vary. memes, analogously to genes, vary in their aptitude to replicate; memes which are good at getting themselves copied tend to spread and remain, whereas the less good ones have a higher probability of being ignored and forgotten. thus "better" memes are selected. the lack of a consistent, rigorous, and precise understanding of what typically makes up one unit of cultural transmission remains a problem in debates about memetics.[12] in contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of dna. in the context of the natural or life sciences, memetics suffers in comparison because, unlike the idea of genes, memes do not necessarily have or need a concrete medium in order to transfer.
[edit]transmission

life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means). malcolm gladwell wrote, "a meme is an idea that behaves like a virus--that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it infects." memes can replicate vertically or horizontally within a single biological generation. they may also lie dormant for long periods of time. memes spread by the behaviors that they generate in their hosts. imitation counts as an important characteristic in the propagation of memes. imitation often involves the copying of an observed behaviour of another individual, but memes may transmit from one individual to another through a copy recorded in an inanimate source, such as a book or a musical score. researchers have observed memetic copying in just a few species on earth, including hominids, dolphins and birds (that learn how to sing by imitating their parents or neighbors).[13]
some commentators have likened the transmission of memes to the spread of contagions.[14] social contagions such as fads, hysteria, copycat crime, and copycat suicide exemplify memes seen as the contagious imitation of ideas. observers distinguish the contagious imitation of memes from instinctively contagious phenomena such as yawning and laughing, which they consider innate (rather than socially learned) behaviors.[13]
aaron lynch described seven general patterns of meme transmission, or "thought contagion":[15]
quantity of parenthood: an idea that influences the number of children one has. children respond particularly receptively to the ideas of their parents, and thus ideas that directly or indirectly encourage a higher birthrate will replicate themselves at a higher rate than those that discourage higher birthrates.
efficiency of parenthood: an idea that increases the proportion of children who will adopt ideas of their parents. cultural separatism exemplifies one practice in which one can expect a higher rate of meme-replication — because the meme for separation creates a barrier from exposure to competing ideas.
proselytic: ideas generally passed to others beyond one's own children. ideas that encourage the proselytism of a meme, as seen in many religious or political movements, can replicate memes horizontally through a given generation, spreading more rapidly than parent-to-child meme-transmissions do.
preservational: ideas that influence those that hold them to continue to hold them for a long time. ideas that encourage longevity in their hosts, or leave their hosts particularly resistant to abandoning or replacing these ideas, enhance the preservability of memes and afford protection from the competition or proselytism of other memes.
adversative: ideas that influence those that hold them to attack or sabotage competing ideas and/or those that hold them. adversative replication can give an advantage in meme transmission when the meme itself encourages aggression against other memes.
cognitive: ideas perceived as cogent by most in the population who encounter them. cognitively transmitted memes depend heavily on a cluster of other ideas and cognitive traits already widely held in the population, and thus usually spread more passively than other forms of meme transmission. memes spread in cognitive transmission do not count as self-replicating.

memes as discrete units

richard dawkins initially defined meme as a noun that "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation".[6] john s. wilkins retained the notion of meme as a kernel of cultural imitation while emphasizing the meme's evolutionary aspect, defining the meme as "the least unit of sociocultural information relative to a selection process that has favourable or unfavourable selection bias that exceeds its endogenous tendency to change."[16] the meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless if that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme. a meme could consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech in which that word first occurred. this forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single unit of self-replicating information found on the self-replicating chromosome.
while the identification of memes as "units" conveys their nature to replicate as discrete, indivisible entities, it does not imply that thoughts somehow become quantized or that "atomic" ideas exist that cannot be dissected into smaller pieces. a meme has no given size. susan blackmore writes that melodies from beethoven's symphonies are commonly used to illustrate the difficulty involved in delimiting memes as discrete units. she notes that while the first four notes of beethoven's fifth symphony ( listen (help·info)) form a meme widely replicated as an independent unit, one can regard the entire symphony as a single meme as well.[12]
some critics[who?] have seen the inability to pin an idea or cultural feature to its key units as an insurmountable problem for memetics. blackmore meets such criticism by stating that memes compare with genes in this respect: that while a gene has no particular size, nor can we ascribe every phenotypic feature directly to a particular gene, it has value because it encapsulates that key unit of inherited expression subject to evolutionary pressures. to illustrate, she notes evolution selects for the gene for features such as eye color; it does not select for the individual nucleotide in a strand of dna. memes play a comparable role in understanding the evolution of imitated behaviors.[12]
the 1981 book genes, mind, and culture: the coevolutionary process by charles j. lumsden and e. o. wilson proposed the theory that genes and culture co-evolve, and that the fundamental biological units of culture must correspond to neuronal networks that function as nodes of semantic memory. they coined their own term, "culturgen", which did not catch on. coauthor wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book consilience: the unity of knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[17]
[edit]evolutionary influences on memes

richard dawkins noted the three conditions that must exist for evolution to occur:[18]
variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements;
heredity or replication, or the capacity to create copies of elements;
differential "fitness", or the opportunity for one element to be more or less suited to the environment than another.
dawkins emphasizes that the process of evolution naturally occurs whenever these conditions co-exist, and that evolution does not apply only to organic elements such as genes. he regards memes as also having the properties necessary for evolution, and thus sees meme evolution as not simply analogous to genetic evolution, but as a real phenomenon subject to the laws of natural selection. dawkins noted that as various ideas pass from one generation to the next, they may either enhance or detract from the survival of the people who obtain those ideas, or influence the survival of the ideas themselves. for example, a certain culture may develop unique designs and methods of tool-making that give it a competitive advantage over another culture. each tool-design thus acts somewhat similarly to a biological gene in that some populations have it and others do not, and the meme's function directly affects the presence of the design in future generations. in keeping with the thesis that in evolution one can regard organisms simply as suitable "hosts" for reproducing genes, dawkins argues that one can view people as "hosts" for replicating memes. consequently, a successful meme may or may not need to provide any benefit to its host.[18]
unlike genetic evolution, memetic evolution can show both darwinian and lamarckian traits. cultural memes will have the characteristic of lamarckian inheritance when a host aspires to replicate the given meme through inference rather than by exactly copying it. take for example the case of the transmission of a simple skill such as hammering a nail, a skill that a learner imitates from watching a demonstration without necessarily imitating every discrete movement modeled by the teacher in the demonstration, stroke for stroke.[19] susan blackmore distinguishes the difference between the two modes of inheritance in the evolution of memes, characterizing the darwinian mode as "copying the instructions" and the lamarckian as "copying the product."[12]
clusters of memes, or memeplexes (also known as meme complexes or as memecomplexes), such as cultural or political doctrines and systems, may also play a part in the acceptance of new memes. memeplexes comprise groups of memes that replicate together and coadapt.[12] memes that fit within a successful memeplex may gain acceptance by "piggybacking" on the success of the memeplex. as an example, john d. gottsch discusses the transmission, mutation and selection of religious memeplexes and the theistic memes contained.[20] theistic memes discussed include the "prohibition of aberrant sexual practices such as incest, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, castration, and religious prostitution", which may have increased vertical transmission of the parent religious memeplex. similar memes are thereby included in the majority of religious memeplexes, and harden over time; they become an "inviolable canon" or set of dogmas, eventually finding their way into secular law. this could also be referred to as the propagation of a taboo.
[edit]memetics

main article: memetics
the discipline of memetics, which dates from the mid 1980s, provides an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme. memeticists have proposed that just as memes function analogously to genes, memetics functions analogously to genetics. memetics attempts to apply conventional scientific methods (such as those used in population genetics and epidemiology) to explain existing patterns and transmission of cultural ideas.
principal criticisms of memetics include the claim that memetics ignores established advances in other fields of cultural study, such as sociology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, and social psychology. questions remain whether or not the meme concept counts as a validly disprovable scientific theory. this view regards memetics as a theory in its infancy: a protoscience to proponents, or a pseudoscience to some detractors.