Introduction to Memes
The word and the concept "meme" were both coined by Richard Dawkins in his classic book The Selfish Gene and later elaborated upon in his subsequent book The Extended Phenotype. A meme is defined as "a unit of cultural transmission" (The Selfish Gene, p. 192). In other words, a meme is a cultural idea held by an adherent or host. Examples of memes include "tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches" (Ibid). Like genes, memes cause "phenotypes" - in this context it is useful to remember that the meme itself - its genotype - is the pure information it contains, like a musical score or a recipe. A meme's phenotype, on the other hand, is its physical expression - the actual music, the cake baked from the recipe, etc.
Memes as Replicators
Just like genes, memes are replicators - whereas genes propagate themselves through the reproduction of the organism, memes propagate themselves through their own transmission from one host to another. Memes, like genes, are also optimons: the contents and implications of a certain idea influence its likelihood of being copied, so it is active; it could be broadcast through an indefinite number of adherents, so it is germ-line. Also like genes, memes can have mutations, or alterations in their specifications - for example, changed words to a catchy tune or a new step in firing pottery. These mutations also replicate, but the memes' content determines their "reproductive" success, or the number of new adherents they spread to. Differential reproduction thus sets up natural selection that is just as inexorable as it is in biology.
There are, however, several differences between memes and genes as replicators. First, genes are "one-way", that is, genotype is the cause of phenotype, but phenotype cannot influence genotype. Memes, on the other hand, can be influenced by their own phenotypes, such as when the words don't quite fit a tune and must be altered. (Of course, the changed meme has mutated and can be viewed as a different meme, but that still doesn't address the fact that no reproduction has occurred to produce the mutant.) In addition, it is a biological fact that genes are particulate entities; they cannot combine a little from one gene and little from another to make a new gene. Memes, however, do not have these restrictions - a person could easily make a new meme by combining two different tunes to produce one new one, which would then enter into the meme pool in its own right.
Consider the following example of a meme and its spread. Suppose a person adopted the belief that the world would end on a certain date - say, 1 January 2001 - unless enough people are awake at midnight. This meme would have the reproductive advantage of conferring a sense of urgency on its host, who would then begin telling everyone he knew to stay awake at midnight that night. Most people would probably not believe him, but his sense of urgency would compel him to insist, beg, and cajole, as well as spreading his meme to everyone he can find. Those that do adopt the meme will share his sense of urgency and begin spreading the meme through their circle of friends. In this way the meme would rapidly diffuse through the population.
As it spread, the meme could also undergo mutations that affect its chances of being replicated. For example, if someone thought that the world would end on 1 January 2001 regardless of what people did, this new meme would have a selective disadvantage because it would lose its sense of urgency. However, if someone adopted the belief that all those asleep at midnight would be killed, this would increase the meme's selective advantage by further encouraging immediate and rapid spread.
Memes and Meme Sets
Just as genes group together in a genome to produce a vehicle (an organism), memes also get together in groups called meme sets, which are analogous to organisms. Meme sets can be large or small, consisting of many or just a few individual memes. Sometimes the borderline between memes and meme sets is blurry, but in general memes cannot be broken down into smaller idea components.
One example of a meme set is the common pro-life argument Abortion is murder. This idea can be broken down into several component memes, including the virtually universal - Murder is morally wrong - and the highly controversial - A fetus has the same rights as an adult human being. Just as organisms can share genes, different meme sets can share memes. The religious idea life is a gift from God obviously is primarily a religious meme, but it often enters into the above argument. Just as the vast majority of organisms will diverge in some of their genetic material, different adherents of a particular meme set may hold different specific memes. For example, a pro-life activist might reject the religious idea that life is a gift from God, but argue that human life is somehow special and therefore anything with the potential to become a human should be preserved. Moreover, a pro-choice activist obviously does not share his meme set with the pro-life activist, but is overwhelmingly likely to agree that murder is wrong.
But, for that matter, it is also likely that the pro-choice activist and pro-life activist have very different "murder memes". Some pro-life activists object to the "murder" of fetuses, but are willing to bomb abortion clinics to communicate their meme. Conversely, some pro-choice activists endorse abortion because the fetus isn't truly human yet, then proceed to advocate cessation of experiments using animals. As can be seen from these examples, memes are often quite varying, and give different shades of meaning to the same words. Memes that appear in different forms within different meme sets are also capable of contradicting each other, usually without being noticed by the adherent.
Memes, Meme Sets, and Cultures
Memes combine to form meme sets, which are analogous to organisms in the biological world. Meme sets, in turn, form the components of memeplexes, or large supergroups of memes, which in turn form a culture. Cultures are analogous to species, and the meme sets that compose a culture are the individual organisms. Memes, in this view, are again the genes, with all the available memes constituting the meme pool.
For example, Roman culture contains a number of different meme sets: religion, politics, entertainment, attitudes toward war, etc. The "Roman religion" meme set included the memes that humans' fates were determined by a set of gods and goddesses, that natural disasters were signs of the gods' disfavor, and that the gods could be appeased by animal sacrifice. During the time of the Roman Republic, the "Roman politics" meme set included the memes that representatives of the people should govern, that tyranny was unfavorable to Rome, and that only men of economic status should have a say in government. These memes in turn were influenced by other memes of the time, such as the idea that men and women did not have same rights, or the idea that one man could own another. Thus culture is a rich tapestry, with individual memes acting as the threads and meme sets as the designs.
Just as natural selection does not select for or against a species, it does not select for or against a culture. However, also as biological evolution may have trends that allow one species to thrive and another to go extinct, cultural evolution has trends that allow certain cultures to supplant other when they compete for the same "resources" of adherents. This phenomenon can be seen in the "Americanization" of immigrants and in the adoption of Western ideas and culture by many non-Western nations.
Memetics
The meme meme has spread fairly rapidly throughout the scientific community, giving rise to the burgeoning science of memetics. Similar to cultural analysis, memetics seeks to apply the techniques of epidemiology to the spread of beliefs and ideas through populations. They also analyze the relative prevalence of various memes and document their independent origins or common ancestry. Memeticists also seek to further explain, clarify, and quantify the theory of memes; they hope to use their theory to make predictions about how humans behave that go beyond what would be expected by evolutionary psychology or sociobiology, which assume genetic benefit to human behavior. Finally, memeticists seek to why humans alone have given rise to memes, why humans evolved as such good meme-spreaders, and why and how humans devote their energies to propagating both their genes and their memes in the modern world. Memetics is yet another one of the many areas in which Darwinian thinking has had a deep and profound influence.
Looking Further: Links and References
These links and references will be of assistance in the study of memes and memetics.
- Books
- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
- The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins
- Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society by Aaron Lynch
- The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore
- Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by Richard Brodie
- Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett
- Websites
- Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
- Memetics Resources
- Meme Central
- Viruses of the Mind by Richard Dawkins
- Memetics from Principia Cybernetica Web
- Memetics Lexicon from Principia Cybernetica Web
