Meme

The term meme (pronounced to rhyme with "dream") was coined by Richard Dawkins in the book The Selfish Gene to mean roughly a unit of cultural evolution, analagous to gene, the unit of biological evolution. (The concept, however, predates the coining of the term; for example, William S. Burroughs' assertion that "Language is a virus"). Memes can represent parts of ideas, languages, tunes, designs, moral and esthetic values, skills, and anything else that is commonly learned and passed on to others as a unit. The study of memes is called memetics.

do cultures evolve?

Dawkins observed that cultures can evolve in much the same way populations of organisms do, by passing ideas from one generation to the next, some of which may enhance or detract from the survival of the person holding them, thereby affecting which of those ideas continue to be passed on to future generations. For example, early cultures may have had different designs and methods for building tools. The culture with the more effective method may well have prospered while others suffered, leading to its method being adopted by a higher proportion of the population as time passed. Each tool design thus acts somewhat similarly to a biological gene; some populations have it and some don't, and the presence of the design in future generations is directly affected by the meme's function. Unlike biological genes which are usually removed from the gene pool by the death of the organisms carrying them, memes "die" by more subtle means such as criticism, persuasion, and even fashion.

non-natural selection

Evolution requires not only inheritance and natural selection, but also mutation, and memes clearly have this property as well. Ideas that get passed on may undergo changes that accumulate over time. Folk tales and myths, for example, are often embellished in the retelling to make them more memorable--and therefore more likely to be retold again. More modern examples can be found in the various urban legends and hoaxes that circulate on the Internet, such as the Goodtimes virus warning.

What distinguishes ideas as memes from other ideas that get passed from person to person is that the likelihood of a meme's being passed on is affected by some property of the meme itself, rather than just by the nature of the people passing it on. For example, tool designs can clearly affect the efficacy of a tool independently of the habits of the different people using them. Legends and myths, for example, often teach a moral lesson or explain a mystery, so they are more likely to be retold to serve different speakers' purposes than other similar stories without those elements.

How "natural" is this type of selection? Perhaps as natural as sexual attraction or ethical habits, e.g. altruism, essential to forming family and culture in the first place. The relationship of the meme to other ideas of evolution, e.g. those that separate ecological, sexual, ethical and moral factors and reserve no special or separate role for "culture" beyond these, seems to be as "pretender to the throne" - pretending to explain these more specific ideas of evolution and culture - but without any model to test. This causes quite a few scientists and others to scoff at culture as any kind of actor in human life:

A famous observation of this type was that of Margaret Thatcher, who bluntly stated "society does not exist" - evidently she saw "it" as a set of survival, seduction and moral choice factors specific to individuals, couples and families, and not as a unified "culture" or "society" in any sense.

memetic virus exchange

In much the same way that the selfish gene concept can be used as a point of view from which to better understand and reason about biological evolution, the meme concept can be used to better understand some otherwise puzzling aspects of human culture (and learned behaviors of other animals as well). However, if "better" is not good enough to test empirically, the question will remain whether the meme concept is good enough for science. Is the meme idea itself simply embedding itself in culture like other bad ideas?

A controversial application of this "selfish meme" parallel is the idea that certain collections of memes can act as "memetic viruses": collections of ideas that behave like independent life forms, and continue to get passed on even at the expense of their hosts simply because they are good at getting passed on. It has been suggested that evangelical religions behave this way; by including the act of passing on their beliefs as a moral virtue, other beliefs of the religion also get passed along even if they aren't particularly valuable to the believer.

Others note that the wide prevelance of human adoption of religious ideas proves that they must have some ecological, sexual, ethical or moral value. Certainly religious promoters claim such value for following their rules or principles - but is that related to what we feel is divine?

the "be happy" and "make others happy" memes

Some spiritual practices, e.g. Buddism, clearly promote ecological and moral goals recognizable to most people, e.g. The Noble Eightfold Path emphasizes limited consumption, reduced cruelty, no delegation of violence or participation in violent systems, and a withdrawal from sexual and ethical processes that have no clear ecological or moral value to the practitioner - regardless of the value they may have to others. Transcendental meditation is the ideal: in effect, ignoring the senses and being happy.

The Judeo-Christian-Islamic "Western" religions, however, focus more on sexual rules and ethical codes, and some believe they promote ecological destruction and self-alienation - the traditional "East versus West" debate in religion. People are urged to devote themselves to the needs of others.

The contrast between "be happy" and "make others happy", although not as stark in practice or theory as the traditional debate suggests, may satisfy constraints of different ecological or sexual norms in some non-obvious way. But it seems entirely unlikely that "they aren't particularly valuable to the believer." At least, the majority of people on Earth clearly don't think so.

meme as meme

If we imagine that the meme theory is both true and horrendously destructive, the concept of a meme is itself a meme, and carriers of that meme seem prone to defend it in the form defined by Dawkins because of its singular elegance.

Whether human moral criteria can judge memes "good" or "bad", in general or in specific, is simply not a question that an encyclopedia committed to a neutral point of view can even attempt to answer. But, scientifically, to comprehend the significance of memes to cultural evolution, we must overcome human cognitive bias and culture bias by looking at other species. The nearest human relatives, chimpanzees, according to researchers Roger Fouts and Jane Goodall, live in bands with complex relationships, have nurturing family lives, and substantial wild culture - but seemingly without memes at all. They and other Great Apes seem to be simply immune to the process of making up words or phrases for "new ideas" - absolutely essential to the concept of a meme as defined by Dawkins et al. They create no technologies, but also no wars or genocides, which seems strongly to suggest that so-called "cultural evolution" isn't happening - much.

Ideas of evolution of societies that preceded the formal idea of memes, cultural evolution or the more specific notions of ethical evolution or moral evolution tended to emphasize the dual nature of knowledge - as both deadly danger and a means of leveraging labour to unheard-of efficiency. It is entirely valid to look at the downside of meme propagation for those who carry the meme, and those who get too close to a meme carrier:

meme as murder

Considering the good examples of more peaceful (but diminishing by genocide) near-human populations who don't have many of them, it is common for the term "meme" to be used to refer specifically to ideas that do bodily harm or indirectly impose bodily risk on their users or proximal parties. There are supposed "viral" meme collections, e.g. the Bible itself, some claim, and some speak of a person being "infected" by such ideas.

While this may be a useful rhetorical technique, such popular usage has helped to tarnish whatever scientific respectability the meme concept had - perhaps a natural consequence of cultural evolution away from trust in academics or religions. Indeed, what seems most aligned with the concept of a "meme" in the public mind is the image of the near-human ancestor in the film "2001 A Space Odyssey" being inspired by an alien monolith to lift a bone as a weapon and slaughter his opponents without mercy. Do we now trust movies more than holy books or textbooks? And, are memes just murder?

memecide

If so, we ought to be able to kill them when they get way out of hand. Karl Popper advocated this in the strongest possible terms: "the survival value of intelligence is that it allows us to extinct a bad idea, before the idea extincts us."

Resistance to genetic modification, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, plans for Mutual Assured Destruction, human cloning, stem cell research, nanotechnology and to some degree primate testing and even particle physics seems to be growing in human society at the dawn of the millenium. This follows on a 20th century that was both the most technologically and scientifically vital, and the most violent, in all of recorded human history. It is indisputable that weapons of mass destruction and advanced techniques and technologies of persuasion, especially in combination with populations of people willing to die as suicide bombers or otherwise participate in asymmetric warfare is increasing risk to human cultures, as knowledge, reliable memes, spreads.

It is unclear then whether cultural evolution will be steered, as the Gaians and Greens and anti-globalization movement seem to prefer, towards some heuristic or consensus process that destroys or filters harmful memes. The first effective step towards this in the sciences may come in 2002 when the administration of President G. W. Bush requested that scientists studying anthrax remove details of their experimental apparatus from research publications - prompting strong protests from scientists who claimed that such restrictions curtailed the entire scientific process and raised significant concerns regarding empirical validation of results by other parties reproducing those experiments. Some hysterical voices called it "the end of science as we know it" - but that is a common assertion in an age where science is curtailed by everything from funding cuts to animal rights advocates. Slowly, perhaps, something is trimming the meme tree.

memes must be free?

However, scientists have strong traditions of resisting such tree-trimming - and generally believe in academic freedom rather than more closely directed or secret research driven by military or corporate goals. If nothing else the latter seem to inject unwelcome memes that constitute a serious culture bias, e.g. Harvard researcher, John Collier, who spent 15 years studying the basic biology of the anthrax toxin and solved its puzzle, while "decades of intensive military research on anthrax" failed to identify how the toxin worked or how individuals could be protected from it. "In the post-September 11 world it's tempting to think of curiosity-driven research as an anachronistic luxury," but Collier "may have cracked the mystery of anthrax toxin precisely because he wasn't out to curb the threat of bioterrorism."

can body resist meme?

While bodies may welcome anthrax vaccines, they rightly resist anthrax itself:

Resistance to science and technology has been a common meme (or anti-meme or un-meme) guiding human cultural and cognitive evolution away from disastrous paths - for instance the Japanese during the Tokugawa period stockpiled but did not use guns, just as the US and USSR stockpiled but did not use nuclear weapons in the Cold War period. Ignorance has been in some cultures considered a virtue - in particular ignorance of certain temptations that the culture believes would be disastrous if pursued by many individuals.

Imagine, for instance, a billion angst-ridden hormonally-unstable teenagers all with DNA sequencers, a database of bioweapon virus sequences, and an artificial intelligence whispering the ultimate vision of Paradise in their ear... clearly, the body cannot survive a world ruled entirely by meme. But can it pull back from the brink, and force the embodiment of all memes - effectively making them serve living bodies and ecologies?

The Internet, perhaps the ultimate meme vector, seems to be hosting both sides of this debate. Although it would seem to a naive observer that no adult user of the Internet could oppose its use by other adult, that does in fact happen, based on any number of criteria from ethics to intent to ability to resist hacking or pornography. Can we restrict the most dangerous memes to the wisest people? And who are "we" to decide?

Principia Cybernetica holds a lexicon of memetics concepts, comprising a list of different types of memes. It also refers toan essay by Jaron Lanier: The ideology of cybernetic totalist intellectuals which is very strongly critical of "meme totalists" who assert memes over bodies.