meme

memes as discrete units

richard dawkins initially defined meme as a noun that "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation".[6] john s. wilkins retained the notion of meme as a kernel of cultural imitation while emphasizing the meme's evolutionary aspect, defining the meme as "the least unit of sociocultural information relative to a selection process that has favourable or unfavourable selection bias that exceeds its endogenous tendency to change."[16] the meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless if that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme. a meme could consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech in which that word first occurred. this forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single unit of self-replicating information found on the self-replicating chromosome.
while the identification of memes as "units" conveys their nature to replicate as discrete, indivisible entities, it does not imply that thoughts somehow become quantized or that "atomic" ideas exist that cannot be dissected into smaller pieces. a meme has no given size. susan blackmore writes that melodies from beethoven's symphonies are commonly used to illustrate the difficulty involved in delimiting memes as discrete units. she notes that while the first four notes of beethoven's fifth symphony ( listen (help·info)) form a meme widely replicated as an independent unit, one can regard the entire symphony as a single meme as well.[12]
some critics[who?] have seen the inability to pin an idea or cultural feature to its key units as an insurmountable problem for memetics. blackmore meets such criticism by stating that memes compare with genes in this respect: that while a gene has no particular size, nor can we ascribe every phenotypic feature directly to a particular gene, it has value because it encapsulates that key unit of inherited expression subject to evolutionary pressures. to illustrate, she notes evolution selects for the gene for features such as eye color; it does not select for the individual nucleotide in a strand of dna. memes play a comparable role in understanding the evolution of imitated behaviors.[12]
the 1981 book genes, mind, and culture: the coevolutionary process by charles j. lumsden and e. o. wilson proposed the theory that genes and culture co-evolve, and that the fundamental biological units of culture must correspond to neuronal networks that function as nodes of semantic memory. they coined their own term, "culturgen", which did not catch on. coauthor wilson later acknowledged the term meme as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book consilience: the unity of knowledge, which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences.[17]
[edit]evolutionary influences on memes

richard dawkins noted the three conditions that must exist for evolution to occur:[18]
variation, or the introduction of new change to existing elements;
heredity or replication, or the capacity to create copies of elements;
differential "fitness", or the opportunity for one element to be more or less suited to the environment than another.
dawkins emphasizes that the process of evolution naturally occurs whenever these conditions co-exist, and that evolution does not apply only to organic elements such as genes. he regards memes as also having the properties necessary for evolution, and thus sees meme evolution as not simply analogous to genetic evolution, but as a real phenomenon subject to the laws of natural selection. dawkins noted that as various ideas pass from one generation to the next, they may either enhance or detract from the survival of the people who obtain those ideas, or influence the survival of the ideas themselves. for example, a certain culture may develop unique designs and methods of tool-making that give it a competitive advantage over another culture. each tool-design thus acts somewhat similarly to a biological gene in that some populations have it and others do not, and the meme's function directly affects the presence of the design in future generations. in keeping with the thesis that in evolution one can regard organisms simply as suitable "hosts" for reproducing genes, dawkins argues that one can view people as "hosts" for replicating memes. consequently, a successful meme may or may not need to provide any benefit to its host.[18]
unlike genetic evolution, memetic evolution can show both darwinian and lamarckian traits. cultural memes will have the characteristic of lamarckian inheritance when a host aspires to replicate the given meme through inference rather than by exactly copying it. take for example the case of the transmission of a simple skill such as hammering a nail, a skill that a learner imitates from watching a demonstration without necessarily imitating every discrete movement modeled by the teacher in the demonstration, stroke for stroke.[19] susan blackmore distinguishes the difference between the two modes of inheritance in the evolution of memes, characterizing the darwinian mode as "copying the instructions" and the lamarckian as "copying the product."[12]
clusters of memes, or memeplexes (also known as meme complexes or as memecomplexes), such as cultural or political doctrines and systems, may also play a part in the acceptance of new memes. memeplexes comprise groups of memes that replicate together and coadapt.[12] memes that fit within a successful memeplex may gain acceptance by "piggybacking" on the success of the memeplex. as an example, john d. gottsch discusses the transmission, mutation and selection of religious memeplexes and the theistic memes contained.[20] theistic memes discussed include the "prohibition of aberrant sexual practices such as incest, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, castration, and religious prostitution", which may have increased vertical transmission of the parent religious memeplex. similar memes are thereby included in the majority of religious memeplexes, and harden over time; they become an "inviolable canon" or set of dogmas, eventually finding their way into secular law. this could also be referred to as the propagation of a taboo.
[edit]memetics

main article: memetics
the discipline of memetics, which dates from the mid 1980s, provides an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme. memeticists have proposed that just as memes function analogously to genes, memetics functions analogously to genetics. memetics attempts to apply conventional scientific methods (such as those used in population genetics and epidemiology) to explain existing patterns and transmission of cultural ideas.
principal criticisms of memetics include the claim that memetics ignores established advances in other fields of cultural study, such as sociology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, and social psychology. questions remain whether or not the meme concept counts as a validly disprovable scientific theory. this view regards memetics as a theory in its infancy: a protoscience to proponents, or a pseudoscience to some detractors.