Robert, okay, point out to me the scientific research that validates memes as a scientific idea, using "the same mechanisms" as genetics, and I will gladly learn to speak memetics. Until then, I have to continue to see memetics in terms of our enthusiastic analogizing tendency. This analogizing occurred also after Darwin published his theory, with the infamous example of social Darwinism, and 'evolution' is still used imprecisely today to satisfy our need to believe that history is moving toward some higher goal.

You yourself say that memetics is a 'concept.' Exactly. Genetics, by contrast, consists of scientifically validated theories.

I think we should look into a book on memetics as a future non-fiction suggestion. I think it's a valid field of scientific study, but due to how new the idea is, it's underdeveloped. Your mistrust of the concept is valid, and I think it would make the discussions rewarding. Otherwise, as we've both noted, we're relying too much on speculation.

The Wiki on memes is quite instructive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme also links to other relevant pages such as

* Dawkins' speech on the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins 2006
* "Evolution and Memes: The human brain as a selective imitation device": article by Susan Blackmore.
* A short piece by Mike Godwin on memes in Wired Magazine.
* Journal of Memetics peer refereed journal of memetics published from 1997 until 2005
* Susan Blackmore: Memes and "temes", TED Talks February 2008


The detailed analogy with genes as units of evolution breaks down, as DWill has argued, as memes do not seem to have the same discrete identity as genes. However, to some extent this misses the point. Dawkins introduced memes to show that in many ways culture evolves in the same way as nature but in a much speeded up way. Many of the laws of evolution which are clearly evident in genetics do also apply to culture. The point is that culture has traditionally been analysed as completely separate from nature, as a gift from God, and Dawkins is showing that this religious tradition is a highly flawed assumption. Even if the detail of the meme theory loses something in the genetic analogy, the overall idea is very helpful as a way to see how ideas enter culture and then mutate and evolve. It is the mixing of ideas which seems to be quite different from and more complex than the sexual mixing of genes.


Further wiki pages linked from the meme page are
* Cultural evolution
* Dual inheritance theory
* Evolution of an idea
* Evolutionary linguistics
* History of ideas
* Imitation
* Memetics
* Memetic engineering
* Self-replication
* Sociocultural evolution
* Spiral Dynamics
* Viral marketing
* Viral video
* Werther effect

You've presented a good case for going farther with investigating this new field, as Interbane recommends. The main question to be answered seems to be whether historyand culture are actually something more analyzable, in the reductive way of science, than we've realized up to now. This would be a useful thing if it's true.

PS: To my memory, Dawkins doesn't even mention memes in his book on religion. Am I right about this? If I am, why would he hold back with such a useful tool?

You mean The God Delusion? Yes, there's a fair bit about memes and memeplexes in that book. See this link for a brief defense of the meme theory. Start with the paragraph that begins: "Some people have objected to memetic explanations, on various grounds that usually stem from the fact that memes are not entirely like genes."

http://books.google.com/books?id=yq1xDpicghkC&pg=PA192&lpg=PA192&dq=dawkins+might+the+same+be+true+of+memes&source=bl&ots=1ggGZ5IeCS&sig=OSRQr_uCdXy1nkTw9sxcI0Xvknk&hl=en&ei=pFHFStfLEZWV8AaaqOhI&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CB8Q6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=&f=false.

You know, I would be interested in reading Susan Blackmore's book at some point.

Yes. I meant The God Delusion and just had no memory of his discussing memes again in the book. Thanks for correcting me. I'm curious about how Dawkins sees the role of memes in an overall sense. In the notes to Chapter 11, he says that, with the idea of memes, his designs on culture were small almost to the vanishing point (words to that effect).

Evolution of computers and the internet is a great example of memetics, and how cultural evolution can be compared to genetic evolution. The rapid change and improvement in computing power over the last 30 years reminds me a lot of the Cambrian Explosion, which Stephen Jay Gould describes in his superb book Wonderful Life. At that time, over 500 million years ago, microbial life had been evolving on earth for almost 3.5 billion years, and plants had been steadily increasing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere by photosynthesis. Then, oxygen seems to have reached a critical mass which enabled the sudden emergence of macrobial multi-cellular life. The result, as explained in Wonderful Life, was that numerous different body plans evolved, and there were all sorts of weird and wonderful body shapes competing. The most efficient turned out to include the vertebrate phylum, and others such as the invertebrate body plans of insects. The numerous other phyla from the Cambrian time went extinct. The result was that evolution after the Cambrian period was at the level of genus and species, rather than at the phylum (body plan) level. New body plans just could not get a look in, because the most efficient (or lucky?) plans had been selected by nature in the Cambrian, and had monopolised the available ecological niches.

Looking at the comparison to computing, starting from the emergence of the PC in the 1970s, we can similarly see that there were multiple rival approaches that emerged at the level of the basic plan, of hardware and operating system. As these competed for market share, MicroSoft outcompeted others with its Windows, Icons, Mouse and Pull Down Menus (WIMP) interface. Similarly, Word and Excel proved superior to rivals such as Word Perfect and Lotus123 (Does anyone remember Wang?). Similar evolutionary battles have been fought in the internet. The extinct softwares are like the extinct phyla of the Cambrian Age. The success of Windows can be seen in terms of evolutionary memetic response to selective pressure, and in terms of Dawkins' criteria of the differential survival of replicating entities. However, perhaps Linux will prove more efficient and will eventually replace Windows? It seems unlikely, given the model of the power of possession of the field which Dawkins discusses, with residents mostly beating intruders. Many more efficient layouts have been proposed for the QWERTY keyboard, but none succeed because of the evolutionary advantage conferred by first mover resident status of the dominant layout.

Robert, if you omit the one reference to memes in the body of your post, there is no loss of clarity. That is part of my doubts about memes: whether they offer any advantage over the descriptive tools (mainly common language) that we already have. As for the comparison of the niches that organisms occupy with those that products occupy, okay, I can't see an objection to it, and the comparison can be applied all throughout history from the napping techniques used to make stone points, to the burst of bicycle designs in the late 19th century, to the explosion of computing products beginning in the late 20th century. We've had history now for a long while. Is what has been going on to shape these changes subject to some kind of natural law that can be stated as a scientific proposition? This seems to be what you're getting at toward the end of your post. I agree that memetics would have a place if it could step in to do this. It can be a problem, though, that this 'science' seems to need to derive its principles from the science of genetics, and further, that even the laws of genetics are nebulous at best when it comes to the 'what will happen' aspect.

Maybe I seem stuck on this topic. But I had a thought that perhaps memes apply especially to the field of linguistics. What attracted me was the similarity in sound in the terms 'memes,' 'morphemes,' 'phonemes,' 'lexemes,' etc. This is only a superficial connection, but I decided to look farther and came up with this excerpt from the Language Log, by 'Tecumseh Fitch.'

"Meme" is a rather successful coinage of Richard Dawkins. The term refers to a transmissible chunk of imitated form, or of meaning. Thus, a meme is an idea that can spread from mind to mind in much the same way as genes are transmitted from body to body through the generations, and it invites all sorts of analogies (the "meme pool", "memetic evolution", the struggle among competing memes, etc). Unfortunately, till now, there has been little use of the most apt referent of the term: namely the changes in word structure and/or meaning that are the traditional bread-and-butter of historical linguistics. If ever there is to be a rigorous, empirical approach to memetics, the richest source of data will be that of historical linguistics: observing the fates of new words as they struggle for survival, mutating their form and their meaning through successive iterations of "cultural evolution". I made this point precisely because I agree with Thomason that historical linguistics is "one of the most successful historical sciences you'll find anywhere".

I agree the memetics of language is central, although the question of applying memetics to the broader question of cultural evolution, especially in technology, is also useful.

Regarding linguistic evolution, in a recent post, I noted that “On the existence of Zeus, people may wish to look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyaus_Pita to see that Zeus is actually exactly the same as Jehovah. Both derive etymologically from the Indian Dyaus Pita, the sky father of the Vedic Pantheon. Greek Zeus Patera = Roman Ju Piter = Christian Deus Pater. None are entities, but rather human efforts to explain the meaning of life.”

I commented earlier here that God is a meme, and the quoted text explains how the God meme has evolved. The etymology of the Latin for “God the Father” can be traced very clearly to pagan roots, also showing the old cultural link between India and Europe. We also see here the stability (copy fidelity) of the main Western term for the sky father, stretching back in time to the Vedic term Pita.

In looking at how religious belief evolves, one way in which the meme differs strongly from the gene is in the stability of the transmission. Genes have strong copy fidelity, only mutating very rarely, with most mutations causing death. By contrast, the mutation of memes is far faster and more various than is generally acknowledged.

Consider the origins of Christianity. The mythicist view is that the Gospels are a fiction that was written in Alexandria with the conscious express purpose of establishing a new religion by inventing a mythical saviour who would press all the buttons needed for mass appeal. Christians maintain that the gospels were written between 70 and 100 AD, but there is no real evidence that they existed before the second or perhaps even the third century.

It is easy to imagine an evolutionary memetic process akin to ‘Chinese whispers’ which turned an original work of fiction into a dogma. A good example of Chinese whispers is the story from the First World War, where an order from the front was passed by word of mouth to the rear, and “We’re going to advance, send us reinforcements” was eventually transmitted as “We’re going to a dance, send us three and fourpence.” People’s hearing and memory and desires are flawed, giving great potential for hearing whatever you want to hear, rather than what is actually said.

In the Christian example, we have to look to the psychology of belief to explain how the Christ meme became the Christian dogma. This psychology is well captured in one of the famous “proofs” of the existence of God – that if we can imagine a perfect being, then a real one is better than an imaginary one so a real one must exist. (I kid you not, this is one of the main pieces of “logic” of St Thomas Aquinas). Anyway, exactly the same psychological logic applies to Jesus, that if we can imagine a perfect messiah, then a real messiah is so much better and therefore exists.

Trying to recreate how this meme may have evolved, the religious scholars of Alexandria had a strong agenda to imagine a better world than the Roman Empire. We can imagine their original thought processes, building on the prophecies of the Old Testament. Starting from ‘if only we had a messiah, this is what he would have been like’, the oral transmission of these messianic stories occurred over centuries before they found their final form. Conceivably, the first tellers meant the stories as myth. However, it is well known that a tale improves in the telling. As hearers tell a good story to others, they steadily embroider it. A very useful first embroidery, when you have a political agenda, is that the fantasy you heard is an actual story of events. If, as stated in John 20:31 the agenda is that “these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” then clearly the agenda is not to provide an accurate record of events, but rather whatever will be most conducive to spreading belief.

So the idea of the meme as an evolving and mutating idea is very helpful to interpret the origins of Christianity. A key point is that in an oral culture, the weight of moral stories is increased by falsely claiming that invented fictions are historically based. This would go through several stages, each of which could last decades as the view of a community –
1. I know its false;
2. I heard that it is false;
3. I don’t know if its true or false;
4. It may be true;
5. It is probably true
6. It is definitely true
7. If you so much as ask if it is true you are a heretic and blasphemer and will go to hell.

This last dogmatic imperial phase is expressed in the Bible, with the statement at 1 John 4:2 “This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. Every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God but is the spirit of the antichrist.”

So the Christian meme became that belief in the story of the incarnation was a test of faith. Pagans such as Celsus regarded this Christian method with contempt, as there was no historical evidence that Jesus lived. However, history shows that this meme of the Word made Flesh proved more powerful than pagan logic, and produced the Dark Ages. This meme of blind faith is only now unravelling at the popular level.

That was well said, Robert. This difference you point out is so pronounced, though, that for me it calls into question even the analogy between memes and genes. Fidelity of copying characterizes genes, whereas, as you note, mutation is the order of the day with memes. Is it meaningful for us to then say memes and genes are similar except for the rate of change?

More than distortion or noise, I think what accounts for the lack of copying fidelity is the modifications that each unique mind makes to the ideas or memes that it receives. There probably never exists an exact copy of an idea because of the uniqueness of mind that modifies it. There will be similarities in the modifications due to cultural similarities, though. The example of Christianity coming in on top of indigenous religions might illustrate this, with the hybridization that will result. But to an extent, it's all a matter of hybridization, whenever ideas move on through time.

Isn't the problem that memetics more properly falls in the realm of sociology and not science? It seems to me that the relationship to genetics is more of an analogy than a literal simile.

Dawkins wrote on p. 194, "If the meme is a scientific idea..." He wasn't sure in 1975, and in the notes to the 30th anniversary edition he doesn't make the claim that its scientific basis has now been established--just that the idea has been often cited. It does seem that 30 years would have been enough time to establish whether memetics is science or social science, as you suggest.

I have always suspected that Jesus was a real person the same way Robin Hood was a real person. The man who became "Robin Hood" existed, but his real life story was likely much more mundane and it has been embellished to the point where it has become complete fiction. It seems to me that for a myth to have that kind of staying power it probably started as something more or less true. Part of the appeal would be that it really happened. And only through the retelling process, the Chinese whispers Robert speaks of, does it become increasingly fictionalized.

We see that today in movies or books that purport to be "based on true events." The authors invent dialogue and add events to help the story along. Actors will probably look nothing like their real life counterparts. The story is more fiction than fact even before it leaves the storyboard. And, yet, people are intrigued because it is passed off as true.

I suspect we will never know if Jesus really existed. I still think a real man probably served as a template for him—maybe a rabble rouser just as Robin Hood was—but we will never know for sure. On the other hand, it seems not so unlikely that a religion could be completely fabricated. Look at scientology, which is so bizarre and sci-fi-esque that it could have been made up by a science fiction writer. Oh right, it was.

And yet, many memes have strong stability, especially those at the heart of world religions. Orthodoxy is an attempt to suppress memetic evolution, acting as a strong selection pressure for stability. I think you over-estimate the power of individuality. Conformist societies encourage everyone to be the same, and have been quite successful in this. Group identity has a powerful evolutionary attraction. I recently commented that evolution of brain chemicals such as dopamine, a chemical partly responsible for strategic goal setting, are effectively evidence of group selection. A scientific article on evolution of dopamine and goal directed behaviour is at Animal Foraging and the Evolution of Goal-Directed Cognition. This community goal setting ability that has evolved in 'foraging for information' as cortically evolved from an optimal foraging behavior called area-restricted search, is a key to the evolution of memes. As people’s communal goals evolve, so do their memes.

For example, the meme 'truth, justice and the American way' has a more ironic ring now than it did in the 1950s.