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Memetics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Memetics is an approach to evolutionary models of information transfer
based on the concept of the meme. Just as memes are analogous to genes,
memetics is analogous to genetics.

Contents

* 1 History of the term
* 2 Internalists and externalists
* 3 Maturity
* 4 New developments
* 5 Open questions
* 6 Terminology
* 7 See also
* 8 References

History of the term

In his book The Selfish Gene (1976), the ethologist Richard Dawkins
coined 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 - that is, it has causal agency - 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 behaviour and
ultimately culture, since the principal topic of the book was genetics.
Dawkins apparently did not intend to present a comprehensive theory of
memetics in The Selfish Gene, but rather coined the term meme in a
speculative spirit. Accordingly, the term "unit of information" came to
be defined in different ways by many scientists.

The modern memetics movement dates from the mid 1980s (a January 1983
Metamagical Themas column by Douglas Hofstadter in Scientific American
was influential). The study differs from mainstream cultural
evolutionary theory in that its practitioners frequently come from
outside 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 backgrounds. 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. In his 1993 essay Viruses of the Mind, Richard
Dawkins used memetics to explain the phenomenon of religious belief and
the various characteristics of organised religions.

However, the foundation of memetics in full modern incarnation
originates in the publication in 1996, of two books by authors outside
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. The Journal
of Memetics, Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, has since
then been taken over by Francis Heylighen of the CLEA research
institute at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The e-journal soon became
the central point for publication and debate within the nascent
memetics community. (There had been a short-lived paper memetics
publication starting in 1990, the Journal of Ideas edited by Elan
Moritz. [1])[2]) 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 term is a transliteration^[citation needed] of the Ancient Greek
µiµyty%*s, mimitís, meaning "imitator, pretender" and was used in 1904
by the German evolutionary biologist Richard Semon, best known for his
development of the engram theory of memory, in his work Die mnemischen
Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen,
translated into English in 1921 as The Mneme. Until Daniel Schacter
published Forgotten Ideas, Neglected Pioneers: Richard Semon and the
Story of Memory in 2000, Semon's work had little influence.

Internalists and externalists

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
rationale for externalism was that internal brain entities are not
observable, and memetics cannot advance as a science, especially a
quantitative science, 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 foreword by Dennett, in 2000.

Maturity

In 2005, the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information
Transmission 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. 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 moved to work as a computer programmer in the pharmaceutical
industry, although he still occasionally publishes on memetics-related
matters. 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),
adopting the self-description "thought contagionist". Lynch lost his
previous funding from a private sponsor and after his book royalties
declined, he was unable to support himself as a private
memetics/thought-contagion consultant. (He sadly became paranoid,
believing that a cabal of opponents were pursuing him. Ultimately
homeless, he died of an accidental drug overdose in late 2005 (see Talk
section of Aaron Lynch article).)

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.

New developments

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
resistant 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. Some
memeticists, however, see this as more of a continuum of meme strength,
rather than two types of memes.

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 algorithm 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. Keith Henson who wrote Memetics and the
Modular-Mind (Analog Aug. 1987) [3] makes the case that memetics needs
to incorporate Evolutionary psychology to understand the psychological
traits of a meme's host. [4] This is especially true of time-varying,
meme-amplification host-traits, such as those leading to wars. See
Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War.[5] [6]

The application of memetics to a difficult complex social system
problem, environmental sustainability, has recently been attempted at
thwink.org. Using meme types and memetic infection in several stock and
flow simulation models, Jack Harich has demonstrated several
interesting phenomena that are best, and perhaps only, explained by
memes. One model, The Dueling Loops of the Political Powerplace, argues
that the fundamental reason corruption is the norm in politics is due
to an inherent structural advantage of one feedback loop pitted against
another. Another model, The Memetic Evolution of Solutions to Difficult
Problems, uses memes, the evolutionary algorithm, and the scientific
method to show how complex solutions evolve over time and how that
process can be improved. The insights gained from these models are
being used to engineer memetic solution elements to the sustainability
problem.

Francis Heylighen of the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary
Studies has postulated what he calls "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.

In Selfish Sounds and Linguistic Evolution (2004, Cambridge University
Press), Austrian linguist Nikolaus Ritt has attempted to operationalise
memetic concepts and use them for the explanation of long term sound
changes and change conspiracies in early English. It is argued that a
generalised Darwinian framework for handling cultural change can
provide explanations where established, speaker centred approaches fail
to do so. The book makes comparatively concrete suggestions about the
possible material structure of memes, and provides two empirically rich
case studies.

In A Memetic Paradigm of Project Management (International Journal of
Project Management, 23 (8) 575-583) Australian academic S.J. Whitty has
argued that project management is a memeplex with the language and
stories of its practitioners at its core. This radical, some say
heretical approach requires project managers to consider that most of
what they call a project and what it is to manage one is an illusion; a
human construct about a collection of feelings, expectations, and
sensations, cleverly conjured up, fashioned, and conveniently labelled
by the human brain. It also requires project managers to consider that
the reasons for using project management are not consciously driven to
maximize profit. Project managers are required to consider project
management as naturally occurring, self-serving, evolving and designing
organizations for its own purpose.

In "The Evolution of IT Innovations in Swedish Organizations: A
Darwinian Critique of `Lamarckian' Institutional Economics", Journal of
Evolutionary Economics, vol. 17, No. 1 (Feb 2007) Swedish political
scientist Mikael Sandberg argues against "Lamarckian" interpretations
of institutional and techological evolution and studies creative
innovation of information technologies in governmental and private
organizations in Sweden in the 1990s from a memetic perspective.
Comparing the effects of active ("Lamarckian) IT strategy versus
user-producer interactivity (Darwinian co-evolution), evidence from
Swedish organizations shows that co-evolutionary interactivity is
almost four times as strong a factor behind IT creativity as the
`Lamarckian' IT strategy.

Open questions

This section does not cite any references or sources.
Please improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources.
Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. (tagged since
September 2007)
* How can the meme be measured as a cultural unit in cultural
evolution? Can one break culture down into individual
"characteristics" or "units," or is this a reductionist approach
that fails to recognize the importance of treating culture as a
system? Do "units" of culture even exist as discrete entities, and
if not what serious analytical purpose does it serve to frame
culture in such atomistic terms?
+ 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 are biological and cultural evolution? Are the two
processes similar at all, or is the idea that they somehow "must
be" based on a forced analogy? Does the fact that any process of
change can be rhetorically framed as a process of "evolution"
actually tell us anything significant about the phenomenon at hand?
* Does memetic evolution follow the Lamarckian evolution model, where
characteristics are acquired during a specimen's lifetime and
passed to its descendents? If so, does this model not imply that
"memes," unlike genes, may undergo radical changes in the course of
one or two generations? Given the lack of an identifiable substrate
such as DNA, how does one even identify the "descendents" of a
given meme, and what does this imply for the entire project of
tracking memes during the course of their "evolution"?
* What is the interplay between the memetic approach and the recent
advancements of computer science, including computational
sociology?
* As memetics is concerned with cultural evolution, and much of
culture is transmitted through language, why are the fields of
historical and evolutionary linguistics as well as linguistic
pragmatics ignored in discussions of memetics? How can one study
culture without showing a practical interest in the instruments of
its transmission?
* In the same vein, why do most writers on memetics show so little
interest in or even awareness of the massive literature on culture
produced in the social sciences and humanities over the past 100
years? Social theorists such as Max Weber, Pierre Bourdieu, and
Clifford Geertz, as well as more recent figures, have produced
highly sophisticated answers to the question of how to
conceptualize "culture" as symbolic system and/or as embodied
practice. Does memetics run the risk of reinventing the wheel,
inadvertently repeating the mistakes of long-discredited theories
such as diffusionism in anthropology?
* What about human consciousness and agency? Can "culture" be studied
at all, as so much of memetics pretends, without a serious attempt
to take these very real phenomena into account, or without trying
to attain an intersubjective (rather than "objective")
understanding of other human beings' ways of seeing and acting in
the world?
* Will memetics live up to the definition of science (i.e. be able to
be proven valid) through induction, falsifiability, coherentism and
respect for Occam's Razor? Or on the other hand, will it prove to
be an intellectual fad crippled by its foundations in naive
naturalism and positivism, and its corresponding failure to deal
with the interpretive turn in social science inspired by
antipositivism, postpositivism, and hermeneutics?

Terminology

* Memotype - is the actual information-content of a meme.^[citation
needed]

* Meme-complex - (sometimes abbreviated memeplex) is a collection or
grouping of memes that have evolved into a mutually supportive or
symbiotic relationship.^[citation needed] Simply put, a
meme-complex is a set of ideas that reinforce each other.
Meme-complexes are roughly analogous to the symbiotic collection of
individual genes that make up the genetic codes of biological
organisms. An example of a memeplex would be a religion.

* Memeoid - is a neologism for people who have been taken over by a
meme to the extent that their own survival becomes inconsequential.
Examples include kamikazes, suicide bombers and cult members who
commit mass suicide. The term was apparently coined by H. Keith
Henson in "Memes, L5 and the Religion of the Space Colonies," L5
News, 1985 pp. 5-8, [7] and referenced in the expanded second
edition of Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene (p. 330).

References

* Boyd, Rob & Richerson, Peter J. (1985). Culture and the
Evolutionary Process. Chicago University Press.
* Boyd, Rob & Richerson, Peter J. (2005). Not by Genes Alone: How
Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago University Press. ISBN
0-226-71284-2
* Cloak, F.T. 1975. Is a cultural ethology possible? Human Ecology 3:
161--182.
* The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, Oxford University Press, 1976,
2nd edition, December 1989, hardcover, 352 pages, ISBN
0-19-217773-7; April 1992, ISBN 0-19-857519-X; trade paperback,
September 1990, 352 pages, ISBN 0-19-286092-5
* The Electric Meme by Robert Aunger.
* The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore, Oxford University Press, 1999,
hardcover ISBN 0-19-850365-2, trade paperback ISBN 0-9658817-8-4,
May 2000, ISBN 0-19-286212-X
* 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
* Virus of the Mind by Richard Brodie - An introduction to the field
of memetics.
* Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology by Jack Balkin which uses
memetics to explain the growth and spread of ideology.