Memetics

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

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.

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, 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 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
• General Semantics
• Meme pool
• Neuro-linguistic programming
• Self-replication

References

• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, Oxford University Press, 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, 1999, hardcover ISBN 0198503652, trade paperback ISBN 0965881784, May 2000, ISBN 019286212X
• The Ideology of Cybernetic Totalist Intellectuals an essay by Jaron Lanier which is very strongly critical of "meme totalists" who assert memes over bodies.
• Culture as Complex Adaptive System by Hokky Situngkir – formal interplays between memetics and cultural analysis.
• Journal of Memetics – Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission

Further reading

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

External links

• Viral Meme
• Alt.memetics
• Memetics (Principia Cybernetica Web)
• Poker Without Cards – Free eBook of Howard Campbell's "Poker Without Cards", a transcript regarding, among other things, memetics
• Collection of articles on NLP
• NLP Online Magazine – NLP/hypnosis articles
• The Encyclopedia of Systemic NLP and NLP New Coding by Robert Dilts and Judith Delozier
• Automated NLP Events Calendar
• History of NLP
• Glossary of NLP terms
• Reviews of NLP trainings and trainers
• NLP Definitions by NLP Trainers Stever Robbins and Sid Jacobson