Memetics

Memetics is the scientific approach to evolutionary models of information transfer based on the concept of the meme.

Contents

1 History of the term 2 Open questions 3 See also 4 References 5 Further reading 6 External links

History of the term

In his book The Selfish Gene (1976), the ethologist Richard Dawkins invented the term 'meme' to describe a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene, arguing that replication also happens in culture, albeit in a different sense. In his book, Dawkins contended that the meme is a unit of information residing in the brain and is the mutating replicator in human cultural evolution. It is a pattern that can influence its surroundings and can propagate. This created great debate among sociologists, biologists, and scientists of other disciplines, because Dawkins himself did not provide a sufficient explanation of how the replication of units of information in the brain controls human behavior and ultimately culture. Accordingly, the term "unit of information" came to be defined in different ways by many scientists.

The modern memetics movement dates from the early 1990s, and differs from mainstream cultural evolutionary theory in that its practitioners frequently come from outside of the fields of anthropology and sociology, and are often not academics. The massive popular impact of Dawkins' The Selfish Gene has undoubtedly been an important factor in drawing in people of disparate intellectual background. Another crucial stimulus was the publication in 1992 of Consciousness Explained by Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett, which incorporated the meme concept into an influential theory of the mind. However, the foundation of memetics in full modern incarnation originates in the publication in 1996, of two books by authors outside of the academic mainstream: Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by former Microsoft executive turned motivational speaker and professional poker player, Richard Brodie, and Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society by Aaron Lynch, a mathematician and philosopher who worked for many years as an engineer at Fermilab. Lynch conceived his theory totally independently of any contact with academics in the cultural evolutionary sphere, and apparently was not even aware of Dawkins' The Selfish Gene until his book was very close to publication.

Around the same time as the publication of the books by Lynch and Brodie, a new e-journal appeared on the web, hosted by the Centre for Policy Modelling at Manchester Metropolitan University Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission. (http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/overview.html) This soon became the central point for publication and debate within the nascent memetics community. In 1999, Susan Blackmore, a psychologist at the University of the West of England, published The Meme Machine, which more fully worked out the ideas of Dennett, Lynch and Brodie and attempted to compare and contrast them with various approaches from the cultural evolutionary mainstream, as well as providing novel, and controversial, memetic-based theories for the evolution of language and the human sense of individual selfhood.

The memetics movement split almost immediately into those who wanted to stick to Dawkins' definition of a meme as "a unit of information in the brain", and those who wanted to redefine it as observable cultural artefacts and behaviours. These two schools became known as the "internalists" and the "externalists". Prominent internalists included both Lynch and Brodie; the most vocal externalists included Derek Gatherer, a geneticist from Liverpool John Moores University and William Benzon, a writer on cultural evolution and music. The main rational for externalism was that internal brain entities are not observable, and memetics cannot advance as a science, especially a quantitative sceince, unless it moves its emphasis onto the directly quantifiable aspects of culture. Internalists countered with various arguments: that brain states will eventually be directly observable with advanced technology, that most cultural anthropologists agree that culture is about beliefs and not artefacts, or that artefacts cannot be replicators in the same sense as mental entities (or DNA) are replicators. The debate became so heated that a 1998 Symposium on Memetics, organised as part of the 15th International Conference on Cybernetics, passed a motion calling for an end to definitional debates.

The most advanced statement of the internalist school came in 2002 with the publication of The Electric Meme, by Robert Aunger, an anthropologist from the University of Cambridge. Aunger also organised a conference in Cambridge in 1999, at which prominent sociologists and anthropologists were able to give their assessment of the progress made in memetics to that date. This resulted in the publication of Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science, edited by Aunger and with a foreward by Dennett, in 2000.

In 2005, Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission (http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/overview.html) ceased publication and published a set of 'obituaries' for memetics. This was not intended to suggest that there can be no further work on memetics, but that the exciting childhood of memetics, which began in 1996, is finally drawing to a close, and that memetics will have to survive or become extinct in terms of the results it can generate for the field of cultural evolution. Memetics as a social, internet-fueled popular scientific movement is now probably over. Many of the original proponents have moved away from it. Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have both expressed some reservations as to its applicability, Susan Blackmore has left the University of the West of England to become a freelance science writer and now concentrates more on the field of consciousness and cognitive science. Derek Gatherer found the academic world of the north of England to be unsympatethic to his ideas, and gave up to work as a computer programmer in the pharmaceutical industry, although he still publishes the odd memetics article from time to time. Richard Brodie is now climbing the world professional poker rankings. Aaron Lynch disowned the memetics community and the words "meme" and "memetics" (without disowning the ideas in his book).

Susan Blackmore (2002) re-stated the meme definition as whatever is copied from one person to another person, whether habits, skills, songs, stories, or any other kind of information. Further she said that memes, like genes, are replicators. That is, they are information that is copied with variation and selection. Because only some of the variants survive, memes (and hence human cultures) evolve. Memes are copied by imitation, teaching and other methods, and they compete for space in our memories and for the chance to be copied again. Large groups of memes that are copied and passed on together are called co-adapted meme complexes, or memeplexes. In her definition, thus, the way that a meme replicates is through imitation. This requires brain capacity to generally imitate a model or selectively imitate the model. Since the process of social learning varies from one person to another, the imitation process cannot be said to be completely imitated. The sameness of an idea may be expressed with different memes supporting it. This is to say that the mutation rate in memetic evolution is extremely high, and mutations are even possible within each and every interaction of the imitation process. It becomes very interesting when we see that a social system composed of a complex network of microinteractions exists, but at the macro level an order emerges to create culture.

Dawkins responds in A Devil's Chaplain that there are actually two different types of memetic processes. The first is a type of cultural idea, action, or expression, which does have high variance; for instance, a student of his who had inherited some of the mannerisms of Wittgenstein. However, he also describes a self-correcting meme, highly resistent to mutation. As an example of this, he gives origami patterns in elementary schools—except in rare cases, the meme is either passed on in the exact sequence of instructions, or (in the case of a forgetful child) terminates. This type of meme tends not to evolve, and to experience profound mutations in the rare event that it does.

Another definition, given by Hokky Situngkir, tried to offer a more rigorous formalism for the meme, memeplexes, and the deme, seeing the meme as a cultural unit in a cultural complex system. It is based on the Darwinian genetic algorithm with some modifications to account for the different patterns of evolution seen in genes and memes. In the method of memetics as the way to see culture as a complex adaptive system (http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00003471/), he describes a way to see memetics as an alternative methodology of cultural evolution. However, there are as many possible definitions that are credited to the word "meme". For example, in the sense of computer simulation the term memetic programming is used to define a particular computational viewpoint.

Memetics can be simply understood as a method for scientific analysis of cultural evolution. However, proponents of memetics as described in the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission (http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/overview.html) believe that 'memetics' has the potential to be an important and promising analysis of culture using the framework of evolutionary concepts.

Open questions

• How can we measure meme as a cultural unit in cultural evolution?
  • Measurement implies some sort of notational description able to usefully label a meme's content
  • Measurement implies a notation of meme propagation, both historically (a memeology, so to speak) and in the present
  • Measurement implies a way to provide tools for describing likely futures for a meme
• How different is biological evolution and the cultural one?
• What is the interplay between the memetic approach and the recent advancements of computer science, including computational sociology?

See also

• Computational sociology
• Copycat
• Evolution
• Evolutionary epistemology
• General Semantics
• Meme pool
• Memethics
• Neuro-linguistic programming
• Self-replication
• Viral marketing

References

• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, Oxford University Press (http://www.oup.co.uk/), 1976, 2nd edition, December 1989, hardcover, 352 pages, ISBN 0192177737; April 1992, ISBN 019857519X; trade paperback, September 1990, 352 pages, ISBN 0192860925
• The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore, Oxford University Press (http://www.oup.co.uk/), 1999, hardcover ISBN 0198503652, trade paperback ISBN 0965881784, May 2000, ISBN 019286212X
• The Ideology of Cybernetic Totalist Intellectuals (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Annotations/DEFAULT.14.html) an essay by Jaron Lanier which is very strongly critical of "meme totalists" who assert memes over bodies.
• Culture as Complex Adaptive System (http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00003471/) by Hokky Situngkir - formal interplays between memetics and cultural analysis.
• Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission (http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/overview.html)

Further reading

• Virus of the Mind by Richard Brodie — An introduction to the field of memetics.

External links

• Viral Meme (http://viral-meme.info)
• Alt.memetics (http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&group=alt.memetics)
• Memetics (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMES.html) (Principia Cybernetica Web)
• Poker Without Cards (http://www.pokerwithoutcards.com/index.html) - Free eBook of Howard Campbell's "Poker Without Cards", a transcript regarding, among other things, memetics
• Collection of articles on NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) (http://www.nlpschedule.com/)
• NLP Online Magazine (http://www.nlpweekly.com) - NLP/hypnosis articles
• The Encyclopedia of Systemic NLP and NLP New Coding by Robert Dilts and Judith Delozier (http://www.nlpuniversitypress.com/)
• Automated NLP Events Calendar (http://www.nlpschedule.com/cgi-bin/calendar/index/nlp/)
• Glossary of NLP terms (http://www.inspiritive.com.au/glossary.htm)
• Reviews of NLP trainings and trainers (http://www.nlptrainingreviews.com)
• NLP Definitions by NLP Trainers Stever Robbins and Sid Jacobson (http://www.nlpschedule.com/w_neuro_linguistic_programming_definition.html)
• History of NLP (http://www.pe2000.com/nlp-history.htm)de:Mem

es:Memética hu:Memetika nl:Meme pl:Memetyka sv:Mem it:Memetica