MEMES

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MEMES
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Memes

• Term coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish
  Gene (1976) to give an example of another
  selfish replicator besides genes.
• Units of cultural transmission which can be
  copied between humans songs, clothing styles,
  stories, religion, etc.

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Selfish Genes

• Dawkins argues that the primary force of
  evolution is not the individual, but the gene.
  Individuals are merely the way in which genes
  replicate, or, in other words, A chicken is
  just an eggs way of making more eggs.
• Genes are selfish, meaning that they only have
  one objective, which is to blindly make copies of
  themselves.
• Dawkins describes biological organisms as
  "vehicles" or survival machines, with genes as
  the "replicators" that create these organisms as
  a means of acquiring resources and copying
  themselves.

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Susan Blackmore

• Memes are habits, skills, songs, stories, or any
  other kind of information that is copied from
  person to person. 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.

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Susan Blackmore

• A useful general heuristic that the genes could
  bestow might be a predisposition to copy the best
  imitatorsthe people most likely to have accurate
  versions of currently useful memes. (More
  familiar terms for "the best imitators" in modern
  life may be "trendsetters" or "role models.")
• In addition to their bag of useful tricks for
  survival, the best imitators would thereby
  acquire higher social status, further improving
  their survival chances and helping to propagate
  the genes that made them talented imitatorsthe
  genes that gave them big brains specialized at
  accurate generalized imitation.

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Susan Blackmore

• In a final twist, it would pay for people to
  mate with the most proficient imitators, because
  by and large, good imitators have the best
  survival skills. Through this effect, sexual
  selection, guided by memes, could have played a
  role in creating our big brains. By choosing the
  best imitator for a mate, women help propagate
  the genes needed to copy religious rituals,
  colorful clothes, singing, dancing, painting and
  so on. By this process, the legacy of past
  memetic evolution becomes embedded in the
  structures of our brains and we become musical,
  artistic and religious creatures. Our big brains
  are selective imitation devices built by and for
  the memes as much as for the genes.

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Viruses

• Memes behave like viruses or parasites, spreading
  through a population, infecting entire
  populations e.g. Uggs, Paris Hilton, movies,
  jokes, etc.
• In order for a meme to be successfully
  transmitted, it must reward the infector and the
  infected.

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• J. M. Balkin calls memes cultural software
  Individuals embody cultural software they are
  literally information made flesh. They spread it
  to others through communication and social
  learning. Human minds and institutions provide
  the ecology in which cultural software grows,
  thrives, and develops. Human cultural software is
  created out of the diverse elements of cultural
  transmission, also known as "memes."

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Success for Memes

• Longevity
• Fecundity
• Copying-fidelity
• (Current) competition survival of the fittest

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Failure for Memes

• Memes may be rejected by our brains, in a form of
  meme immunity, or memunity. Why might a person
  not, for instance, adopt the Britney head-shaving
  meme?
• In the current age, memes are more likely to go
  dormant than die, tucked away in books or on
  computer disks somewhere.

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Anatomy of a meme
Tasty candy coating (Hook) Gets past mental
immune system
Viral center
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Transmission
Vertical
Memes are transmitted vertically (through time),
and horizontally (from contemporaries.)
You are here
Horizontal
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Vectors
Voice Internet Email Billboards Magazines Gestures
Dance Clothing TV Writing Facial Expressions
Person B
Person A
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Memeplex

• Memes tend to cluster in what are known as meme
  complexes, or memeplexes.
• A car, for instance, can be seen as a cluster of
  memes of comfort, speed, status, sex, gender,
  family, wealth, ecology, nationality, patriotism,
  etc.
• The meme of memes is known as the metameme.

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Halloween Memeplex