Memes

The word "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins in Chapter 11 of his (much-maligned) 1976 book "The Selfish Gene" otherwise wholly devoted to Darwin's evolution by natural selection, genes and genetic evolution.

The following are quotes of Richard Dawkin's Chapter 11 of the "Selfish Gene".

I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drfiting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate which leaves the old gene panting far behind.

The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmisision, or a unit of imitation. `Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like `gene.' I hope my classcist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to `memory,' or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with `cream.'

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N. K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `...memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking --- the meme for, say, belief in life after death'' is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.

That is to say, a meme is an idea, which mutates and is inherited like a gene and spreads like a virus. (Dawkins has in fact written an essay on Viruses of the Mind, which have now infected the Web.)

Such ideas are not original with Dawkins as he himself says, the analogy between cultural and genetic evolution has frequently been pointed out but they really took off after his book. One can think of various reasons Dawkin's clear and compelling case; the (foolish) controversy over his book (see hereunder on the meme "God"); general concern about biological and computer viruses; the millenarian notions of computer groups, who want to see themselves as preparing for the next stage in evolution. Of course, there is also Dawkin's enthusiastic use of the idea as a stick with which to beat religion over the head, which none of his predecessors attempted:

Consider the idea of God.
We do not know how it arose in the meme pool. Probably it originated many times by independent `mutation.' In any case, it is very old indeed. How does it replicate itself? By the spoken and written word, aided by great music and great art. Why does it have such high survival value? Remember that `survival value' here does not mean value for a gene in a gene pool, but value for a meme in a meme pool. The question really means: What is it about the idea of a god which gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. The `everlasting arms' hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies, which, like a doctor's placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.''

In any event, the meme "meme" has become endemic in the Net, making Dawkins a kind of intellectual Typhoid Mary.

Mis à jour le 01/04/2016 pratclif.com