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Memes are ideas that spread through human cultures and across the generations. The word was invented to suggest a strong analogy with genes. I hope the great man will allow me the liberty of quoting his work at length:-
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“I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that 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 that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, 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 classicist 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 sperms and 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.” Richard Dawkins |
A meme does not try to be propagated. Neither does a gene. Looking back with hindsight we can see that certain patterns within the meme or the compatibility or otherwise of that meme to the surrounding culture has an impact on the survival of the meme. A meme is just an idea, it has no goals or intentions. A gene is just a chemical, it has no plan to take over the world. That which has what it takes to be replicated will be replicated.
Memes are like viruses of the mind. As they change from host to host they change their physical make-up without losing their defining pattern. Just like a biological virus. When I get “my wife's cold” I am suffering from a virus that is separated by several generations from that which my wife has, it has no molecules in common, just the patterns of arrangement. The virus particles still in my wife neither know nor care that copies of them are now in my body, and being spread to more potential hosts. Likewise there is no payoff to an idea that gets spread, the idea has no real physical existence. A wave has no real existence, it is not any one group of molecules, it is a gross pattern of behaviour of a fluid, but it is a pattern of behaviour that can please the eye, thrill the surf-rider or flood a city. To say that a wave does not exist is not rational, a meme is just as real. You cannot point to it but you recognize it when you see it.
The truth of a meme is irrelevant to the success of the meme. The classic example is the urban folk tale. If URBAN LEGENDS are your thing you should check out this site: The AFU and Urban Legends Archive.
The "poodle in the microwave" story has been passed around for many years because it is a good meme, it is a little bit shocking, a bit revolting, very fascinating and borderline believable. In case you have lived on Mars since the 1970's I will recap the story. Old lady / scatterbrained woman / blonde has a poodle / other small dog / cat which gets wet in the rain / is washed. To dry off the animal the woman (that part is universal) thinks that drying the animal quickly is called for and so into the microwave goes Fluffy / Fifi etc. Often it is claimed that the story is true, the woman is always a friend of a friend or similarly unnamed person. That meme has been going on since the first microwaves came out, I heard it as a boy. But that is a young meme compared to the belief in the afterlife meme or the son of God meme.
Note: I wrote the paragraph above six months before I read Sue Blackmore's book The Meme Machine in which she uses the very same story as the classic example of a meme.
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Very little of what appears in the Bible is memetically novel. Noah's flood seems to be a hearsay account of a tribal memory of a catastrophic flood beyond any normal tsunami or deluge. There is a novel theory that it began with the opening of the Bosporus, allowing the waters of the Mediterranean to enter and flood what is now the Black Sea, an area of fertile land surrounding a much lower level large freshwater lake. An event like that is going to be talked about for thousands of years! Whether or not that is true there is a lot of evidence that flood stories abound in the Middle East which predate the Bible account by centuries. The son of God meme naturally has a pre-Christian, non-Jewish origin. Alexander the Great was the first man who encouraged his followers to proclaim his status as the son of a god. The virgin birth meme began with a biblical mistranslation. The word for 'unmarried woman' was translated as 'virgin'. Whether or not that was a mistake or a calculated deception it certainly had an effect or two on the world. The faith meme is a classic. This meme helps reinforce any other meme it is associated with. It acts just like the AIDS virus, attacking the immune system. By neutralizing logic and reason the faith meme will allow the other memes it is associated with to take a firm hold on the minds of its host. Christianity is a very advanced form of adaptive multi-stranded meme complex. Like many biological viruses it has smaller units within it that soften up the target, spread the "payload" rapidly and at the same time react with ruthless efficiency against any of the brain's immune responses. None of this should be seen as conspiracy theory, I hardly ever subscribe to them. That which survives and prospers is that which happened to have the necessary qualities. If Christianity was not good at making conversions, absorbing heresies and older beliefs and resisting de-conversion then it would not be as widespread as it is. The College of Cardinals does not sit about planning ways to make their religion more potent or palatable, they believe in it themselves. Misguided fools. |
It is quite a common fallacy that if an idea is shown to be a meme that it is somehow either devalued or discredited. The term virus of the mind is too easily imbued with value judgements that are not appropriate. Ideas spread, if they continue to spread they can be seen as memes and analysed in such a way. Memes can be wrong or right, they can be helpful or harmful. In the main memes are probably more beneficial than harmful. For a harmful meme to spread it must be very powerful and tap into our hopes, fears or desires in a powerful way. Harmful memes are sexier study material, it takes more intelligence to explain why the meme for say, aggressive skinhead haircuts, can spread through a society than the spread of the meme for eating Chinese style food. To say that Christianity is a meme is not to say that it is an evil manipulation, it is just to acknowledge that it spreads in ways that are memetic. Seeing value judgements where there should be none is a very common human weakness.
I think that people who have taken onboard the "meme meme" are in danger of misunderstanding what it is all about. It is essential at all times to remember that memes are not real. They do not have a physical existence in the way that genes do. Genes and memes are both replicators but that does not mean that every property of the gene should be expected to find a correlation with the meme. Just as whales and submarines have similarities but also many differences, almost all of their similarities are far from coincidental, but their differences are very important.
Memes have no shape or structure. They are an abstraction. An abstraction in the same way as "crime" is an abstraction but all too real. It is easy to prove that they do not exist because they have no form, but conversely memes are a very good way of explaining and predicting behaviour. Memes are a way of looking at events. When we look at the universe as if memes were real replicators with their own purposes then we can make sense of things that are otherwise hard to explain. I always have to keep thinking "as if" whenever I think about behaviour that has either genetic or memetic advantage. Some writers have obviously taken the idea to heart and are not constantly pointing out that all the meme stories are analogy and abstraction, but I believe that they do understand the point. I fear that many sceptical people, that is people who are sceptical about memetics, do not fully grasp the necessary "as if" step and try and fail to understand memes as physical entities.
For me memes are real, but in a different, abstract, way compared to genes. Genes are just strands of a chemical. They have no intrinsic meaning. Their meaning comes when they are decoded by the cell structures they help to make. This is an exquisite form of "bootstrapping". DNA without a cell is dead. A cell without DNA (or alternative replicator material) is dead. Only when the two are together is there life.
Memes require intelligent and communicating minds. The marks inscribed on the Voyager space probe are just marks until they are perceived by other intelligent minds capable of communication and copying of behaviour. If that ever happens those marks will become memes again, perhaps the most powerful memes of all time.
It is very easy to wilfully disbelieve something that you would prefer not to believe. Many people are very dismissive of memetics and when they do read memetic books they do so in order to pick holes in the arguments. If you doubt my point about wilful ignorance being easy just try the following experiment; look up in an encyclopaedia or technical book how something like a ink jet printer, mass spectrometer, CD ROM or mobile 'phone works, and as you read it try to not believe it, try to doubt every concept. It is very easy to do, if you put the burden of proof on the new idea you can kill it quite easily, it becomes very easy to dismiss any idea that you do not want to understand. This is the way that creation scientists work. They know what the truth is, anything that casts doubt on that truth has to pass their level of credibility, it doesn't stand a chance, any idea that lends credibility to their version of the truth is obviously easily believable.
Do I do this website because my memes drive me to it?In a way yes, in another way no. The reasons that I usually give for doing the website are the real reasons; I get pleasure from it, I enjoy communicating. Just as I have regular sex with my wife because I enjoy it. Those are the real reasons. That is not to deny that the alternative views are not also correct, that my memes have shaped me to enjoy spreading themselves and my genes tell me that I enjoy sex. Regular sex is good for my genes because it helps ensure that if another man inseminates my wife his sperm will not have things their own way. That is the ultimate explanation of why I have sex at the frequency that I do, it is quite frightening to consider how much of what I used to think was my motivations are in fact nothing of the sort. My genes have built a body that wants to have sex with a regular partner at a convenient interval, convenient for the interests of the genes I carry. The gene's eye view of why I do what I do is frighteningly accurate. So is the meme's eye view. But I do have control over me, don't I? Or is that just another message that the memes ensure I receive to keep me working on their behalf? I think it almost certainly is. If "I" exist to think at all it is because "they" want me to. I am not the bearer of genes and memes, I am their creation. Memes will spread better from hosts that enjoy spreading them and who try to be popular with the other members of the community with which they communicate. That explains why I reply to my e-mail, even the tedious and uninspired stuff, I want to remain seen as a good person suitable to emulate. When people respect me they are more likely to listen to my views, which then have a chance to become memes rather than simply ideas. That is quite enough navel-gazing for now! |