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The term meme ([miːm] in the IPA; rhymes with "dream"; from the Greek word mimema for 'something imitated') often refers to any piece of information passed from one mind to another. In this sense, it relates closely to the academic study of folklore, in that folkloristics deals with the informal communication of cultural information. This usage more closely resembles the analogy of "language as a virus" than Dawkins' analogy (see below) of memes as replicating units. This definition has come into popular use on the Internet to refer to phenomena such as Obey Giant, "All your base are belong to us", Blogebrity and Icy Hot Stuntaz.
The term meme first came into popular use with the publication of the book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins in 1976. The conceptual framework is borrowed from genes -- the unit of biological transmission. By analogy with genetics, a meme is passed from generation to generation, with occasional "mutations," but is passed via family and cultural traditions or training rather than sexual reproduction. This analogy suggests that the definition of a meme should be the physical structure, or abstract code representing that structure, representing a real meme as observed in situ. Genes are not dependent upon their being transfer to be considered existent, they only need to have a definite and unique physical structure. The analogy should, properly, be extended to the concept of a meme.
Unlike genes, memes can typically be passed horizontally as well. Memes often occur in groups called "meme complexes," such as religious or political doctrine. Though Dawkins defined the meme as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation," memeticists vary in their definitions of meme. The lack of a consistent, rigorous and precise definition of a meme remains one of the principal criticisms leveled at memetics, the study of memes.
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 evolutionary biologist Richard Semon: Die Mnemische Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalenempfindungen, translated into English in 1921 as The Mneme.
Different definitions of meme generally agree, very roughly, that a meme consists of some sort of a self-propagating unit of cultural evolution having a resemblance to the gene (the unit of genetics). Dawkins introduced the term after writing 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 exemplifies another self-replicating unit, and most importantly, one which he thought would prove useful in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.
Basic introduction
Though memeticists do not generally agree on a specific definition, one can roughly define 'meme' as any piece of information transferable from one mind to another. Examples might include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods.
Memes supposedly have, as their fundamental property, evolution via natural selection in a way very similar to Charles Darwin's ideas concerning biological evolution, on the premise that replication, mutation, survival and competition influence them. For example, while one idea may become extinct, others will survive, spread and mutate — for better or worse — through modification. Note an important fact, however: not only the memes most beneficial to their hosts will necessarily survive; rather, memes supposedly spread best by functioning as the most effective replicators, which allows for the possibility that successful memes might prove detrimental to their hosts.
An example of this would be memecomplexes (AKA "memeplex") as religion. In the case of Christianity, the memeplex evolved to form the Catholic church. Since the division of the Catholic and Protestant churches, individual memes have been added and deleted to form completely different memeplexes (religions) within the basic umbrella of Christianity, even within Catholicism or Protestantism.
History of the concept of the meme
The concept of the meme has a longer history than most experts would suggest. Plato used the term eidos to speak of the immutable and eternal nature of an existing thing. It was this eidos that the human mind acted upon when reasoning about the world around it. Aristotle rejected this notion in favor of an abstraction and categorization of the world, as percieved by the observer.
The next commentary was Descartes' enquiry into the nature and verifiablity of truth, especially his famous expository phrase "Cogito ergo sum". The concept was especially developed by John Locke and David Hume, two prominent British empiricists. At the time, the terms "idea", "perception", and "impression" came into being. The essential meaning of the term "idea", as it was used, was that it was some existent phenomena resulting from perception of a stimulus and cogitation of that stimulus. Beyond this central concept there is less agreement amongst those philosophers.
Charles Darwin himself struggled with the concept in his early notebooks (M and N Notebooks) and was never able to adequately address the complexities of the human social and cognitive capabilities. While Darwin lacked proof for a biologically heritable element, he had postulated one and seemed to be quite comfortable with the concept of biologically inherited social traits. The latter concept would likely be characterized by a modern biologist as Social Darwinism. Given the early events and tragedies of the century following Darwin's death it is easy to see why most modern scientists and intellectuals approach the meme concept with healthy skepticism and caution.
The concept of ideas that spread according to genetic rules predates the coining by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene; for example William S. Burroughs asserted that "language is a virus."
John Laurent in The Journal of Memetics has suggested that the term 'meme' itself may have derived from the work of the little-known German biologist Richard Semon. In 1904 Semon published Die Mneme (published in English as The Mneme in 1924). His book discussed the cultural transmission of experiences with insights parallel to those of Dawkins. Laurent found the use of the term mneme in The Soul of the White Ant (1927) by Maurice Maeterlinck and highlights its parallels to Dawkins's concept:
Maeterlinck, in discussing theories which attempt to explain 'memory' in termites as well as the other social insects (ants, bees etc.), uses the phrase "engrammata upon the individual mneme" (Maeterlinck, 1927, p.198). Webster's Collegiate dictionary defines an engram as "a memory trace; specif.: a protoplasmic change in neural tissue hypothesized to account for persistence of memory". Note that Maeterlinck explains that he obtained his phrase from the "German philosopher" Richard Semon. [1]
Laurent suggests that the etymological roots of the term 'meme' may come from mimneskesthai, the Greek verb for 'to remember, to keep in mind' rather than from Dawkins' root of mimeisthai, "to imitate."
Everett Rogers pioneered the "Diffusion of innovations" theory (formalised in 1962) which explains how and why people adopt new ideas. Rogers reflected some of the influence of Gabriel Tarde, who set out "laws of imitation" in his book of 1890 that explained how people decided whether to imitate behavior. Francis Heylighen of the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies has come up with what he called memetic selection criteria. These criteria opened the way to a specialized field of applied memetics to find out if these selection criteria could stand the test of quantitative analyses. In 2003 Klaas Chielens carried out these tests in a Masters thesis project on the testability of the selection criteria.
"Ideas have a life of their own"
The old saying "Ideas have a life of their own" clearly encapsulates the "meme about memes". Keith Henson has traced this quote back to 1910 where an unknown interviewer of Gilbert Keith Chesterton used it - apparently as an old saying at that time. (Reported in alt.quotations [2])
Memetics
Main article: Memetics
Memetics, the study of memes, remains a controversial field among many scientists and skeptics. Memetics originated when Richard Dawkins reduced the process of biological genetic evolution to its most fundamental unit: the replicator (or gene). Dawkins, in a search for parallels and other things that he might classify as replicators, suggested that the information and ideas in brains — culture, for example — could function as replicators as well. Computer software may represent another form of replicator with which evolution may eventually build grand things, whether socially as in the open source movement, or through the use of evolutionary algorithms.
Memetics takes concepts from the theory of evolution (especially population genetics) and applies them to human culture. Memetics also uses mathematical models to try to explain many very controversial subjects such as religion and political systems. Principal criticisms of memetics include the claim that memetics ignores established advances in the fields (such as sociology, cognitive psychology, social psychology, etc.) most relevant to the claims and methodologies of memetics.
The term memetic association refers to the idea that memes herd. For example, a meme for blue jeans includes memes for trouser-flies, riveted clothing, blue dye, cotton clothing, belt-loops and double-sewn seams. In this way, groups of memes can operate symbiotically (to use a biological analogy) in the sense that they act for their mutual benefit/survival.
The phrase memetic drift (formed by analogy to genetic drift) refers to the process of a meme changing as it replicates between one person to another. Memetic drift increases when meme transmission occurs in an awkward way. Very few memes show strong memetic inertia (the characteristic of a meme to manifest in the same way and to have the same impact regardless of who receives or transmits the meme). Memetic inertia increases when the meme transfers along with mnemonic devices, such as a rhyme, to preserve the memory of the meme prior to its transmission. See Telephone (game) for one example of memetic drift.
Memeticists generate much memetic terminology by prepending 'mem(e)-' to an existing, usually biological, term or by putting 'mem(e)' in place of 'gen(e)' in various terms. Examples include: meme pool, memotype, memetic engineer, meme-complex.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
The term meme ([miːm] in the IPA; rhymes with "dream"; from the Greek word mimema for 'something imitated') often refers to any piece of information passed from one mind to another. In this sense, it relates closely to the academic study of folklore, in that folkloristics deals with the informal communication of cultural information. This usage more closely resembles the analogy of "language as a virus" than Dawkins' analogy (see below) of memes as replicating units. This definition has come into popular use on the Internet to refer to phenomena such as Obey Giant, "All your base are belong to us", Blogebrity and Icy Hot Stuntaz.
The term meme first came into popular use with the publication of the book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins in 1976. The conceptual framework is borrowed from genes -- the unit of biological transmission. By analogy with genetics, a meme is passed from generation to generation, with occasional "mutations," but is passed via family and cultural traditions or training rather than sexual reproduction. This analogy suggests that the definition of a meme should be the physical structure, or abstract code representing that structure, representing a real meme as observed in situ. Genes are not dependent upon their being transfer to be considered existent, they only need to have a definite and unique physical structure. The analogy should, properly, be extended to the concept of a meme.
Unlike genes, memes can typically be passed horizontally as well. Memes often occur in groups called "meme complexes," such as religious or political doctrine. Though Dawkins defined the meme as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation," memeticists vary in their definitions of meme. The lack of a consistent, rigorous and precise definition of a meme remains one of the principal criticisms leveled at memetics, the study of memes.
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 evolutionary biologist Richard Semon: Die Mnemische Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalenempfindungen, translated into English in 1921 as The Mneme.
Different definitions of meme generally agree, very roughly, that a meme consists of some sort of a self-propagating unit of cultural evolution having a resemblance to the gene (the unit of genetics). Dawkins introduced the term after writing 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 exemplifies another self-replicating unit, and most importantly, one which he thought would prove useful in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.
Basic introduction
Though memeticists do not generally agree on a specific definition, one can roughly define 'meme' as any piece of information transferable from one mind to another. Examples might include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods.
Memes supposedly have, as their fundamental property, evolution via natural selection in a way very similar to Charles Darwin's ideas concerning biological evolution, on the premise that replication, mutation, survival and competition influence them. For example, while one idea may become extinct, others will survive, spread and mutate — for better or worse — through modification. Note an important fact, however: not only the memes most beneficial to their hosts will necessarily survive; rather, memes supposedly spread best by functioning as the most effective replicators, which allows for the possibility that successful memes might prove detrimental to their hosts.
An example of this would be memecomplexes (AKA "memeplex") as religion. In the case of Christianity, the memeplex evolved to form the Catholic church. Since the division of the Catholic and Protestant churches, individual memes have been added and deleted to form completely different memeplexes (religions) within the basic umbrella of Christianity, even within Catholicism or Protestantism.
History of the concept of the meme
The concept of the meme has a longer history than most experts would suggest. Plato used the term eidos to speak of the immutable and eternal nature of an existing thing. It was this eidos that the human mind acted upon when reasoning about the world around it. Aristotle rejected this notion in favor of an abstraction and categorization of the world, as percieved by the observer.
The next commentary was Descartes' enquiry into the nature and verifiablity of truth, especially his famous expository phrase "Cogito ergo sum". The concept was especially developed by John Locke and David Hume, two prominent British empiricists. At the time, the terms "idea", "perception", and "impression" came into being. The essential meaning of the term "idea", as it was used, was that it was some existent phenomena resulting from perception of a stimulus and cogitation of that stimulus. Beyond this central concept there is less agreement amongst those philosophers.
Charles Darwin himself struggled with the concept in his early notebooks (M and N Notebooks) and was never able to adequately address the complexities of the human social and cognitive capabilities. While Darwin lacked proof for a biologically heritable element, he had postulated one and seemed to be quite comfortable with the concept of biologically inherited social traits. The latter concept would likely be characterized by a modern biologist as Social Darwinism. Given the early events and tragedies of the century following Darwin's death it is easy to see why most modern scientists and intellectuals approach the meme concept with healthy skepticism and caution.
The concept of ideas that spread according to genetic rules predates the coining by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene; for example William S. Burroughs asserted that "language is a virus."
John Laurent in The Journal of Memetics has suggested that the term 'meme' itself may have derived from the work of the little-known German biologist Richard Semon. In 1904 Semon published Die Mneme (published in English as The Mneme in 1924). His book discussed the cultural transmission of experiences with insights parallel to those of Dawkins. Laurent found the use of the term mneme in The Soul of the White Ant (1927) by Maurice Maeterlinck and highlights its parallels to Dawkins's concept:
Maeterlinck, in discussing theories which attempt to explain 'memory' in termites as well as the other social insects (ants, bees etc.), uses the phrase "engrammata upon the individual mneme" (Maeterlinck, 1927, p.198). Webster's Collegiate dictionary defines an engram as "a memory trace; specif.: a protoplasmic change in neural tissue hypothesized to account for persistence of memory". Note that Maeterlinck explains that he obtained his phrase from the "German philosopher" Richard Semon. [1]
Laurent suggests that the etymological roots of the term 'meme' may come from mimneskesthai, the Greek verb for 'to remember, to keep in mind' rather than from Dawkins' root of mimeisthai, "to imitate."
Everett Rogers pioneered the "Diffusion of innovations" theory (formalised in 1962) which explains how and why people adopt new ideas. Rogers reflected some of the influence of Gabriel Tarde, who set out "laws of imitation" in his book of 1890 that explained how people decided whether to imitate behavior. Francis Heylighen of the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies has come up with what he called memetic selection criteria. These criteria opened the way to a specialized field of applied memetics to find out if these selection criteria could stand the test of quantitative analyses. In 2003 Klaas Chielens carried out these tests in a Masters thesis project on the testability of the selection criteria.
"Ideas have a life of their own"
The old saying "Ideas have a life of their own" clearly encapsulates the "meme about memes". Keith Henson has traced this quote back to 1910 where an unknown interviewer of Gilbert Keith Chesterton used it - apparently as an old saying at that time. (Reported in alt.quotations [2])
Memetics
Main article: Memetics
Memetics, the study of memes, remains a controversial field among many scientists and skeptics. Memetics originated when Richard Dawkins reduced the process of biological genetic evolution to its most fundamental unit: the replicator (or gene). Dawkins, in a search for parallels and other things that he might classify as replicators, suggested that the information and ideas in brains — culture, for example — could function as replicators as well. Computer software may represent another form of replicator with which evolution may eventually build grand things, whether socially as in the open source movement, or through the use of evolutionary algorithms.
Memetics takes concepts from the theory of evolution (especially population genetics) and applies them to human culture. Memetics also uses mathematical models to try to explain many very controversial subjects such as religion and political systems. Principal criticisms of memetics include the claim that memetics ignores established advances in the fields (such as sociology, cognitive psychology, social psychology, etc.) most relevant to the claims and methodologies of memetics.
The term memetic association refers to the idea that memes herd. For example, a meme for blue jeans includes memes for trouser-flies, riveted clothing, blue dye, cotton clothing, belt-loops and double-sewn seams. In this way, groups of memes can operate symbiotically (to use a biological analogy) in the sense that they act for their mutual benefit/survival.
The phrase memetic drift (formed by analogy to genetic drift) refers to the process of a meme changing as it replicates between one person to another. Memetic drift increases when meme transmission occurs in an awkward way. Very few memes show strong memetic inertia (the characteristic of a meme to manifest in the same way and to have the same impact regardless of who receives or transmits the meme). Memetic inertia increases when the meme transfers along with mnemonic devices, such as a rhyme, to preserve the memory of the meme prior to its transmission. See Telephone (game) for one example of memetic drift.
Memeticists generate much memetic terminology by prepending 'mem(e)-' to an existing, usually biological, term or by putting 'mem(e)' in place of 'gen(e)' in various terms. Examples include: meme pool, memotype, memetic engineer, meme-complex.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
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