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What are Memes? A meme is an idea which can be passed from person to person, the basic unit of cultural transmission. Memes are often analogized to genes, as self replicating information patterns; or to viruses, organic or computer, which prosper by infecting new hosts (in this case human minds) with copies of themselves. The term was invented by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. What are some examples of memes? Things like Rollerblading, Forrest Gump, the Web, skinny half-decaf double lattes at Starbucks, flat tax 20 th century things like the New York Yankees, World Wars, Gershwin, cyberspace and classic things like: the bible, folk dances, Y 2 K, recipes, respect for elders, nodding to say yes, French, Beethoven's Fifth symphony.
Dawkins believed that ideas, habits, behavioral norms etc undergo the same evolutionary struggle and adaptation that the genes in Darwin's Galapagos beasts underwent. A meme, therefore is a unit of cultural transmission, struggling to keep a place in an ever changing world. How do memes work? Think of your mind as an environment.
A new idea arrives: make your own bread with a breadmaker. Your neighbor s mind environment may love Wonderbread, and be very hostile to bread making. However, he may fervently believe that OJ is innocent. You, on the other hand, may have a mind environment where bread making thrives, along with OJ was guilty. So we see that a meme is nothing more than a pattern of information, one that happens to have evolved a form which induces people to repeat that pattern. Typical memes include individual slogans, ideas, catch-phrases, melodies, icons, inventions, and fashions.
It may sound a bit sinister, this idea that people are hosts for mind-altering strings of symbols, but in fact this is what human culture is all about. As a species, we have co-evolved with our memes. Imagine a group of early Homo Sapiens in the Late Pleistocene epoch. Theyve recently arrived with the latest high-tech hand axes and are trying to show their Homo Erectus neighbors how to make them. Those who cant get their heads around the new meme will be at a disadvantage and will be out-evolved by their smarter cousins. Meanwhile, the memes themselves are evolving, just as in the game of Telephone (where a message is whispered from person to person, being slightly mis-replicated each time).
Selection favors the memes which are easiest to understand, to remember, and to communicate to others. So, in theory at least, the ability to understand and communicate complex memes is a survival trait, and natural selection should favor those who arent too conservative to understand new memes. Or does it? In practice, some people are going to be all too ready to commit any new meme that comes along, even if it should turn out to be deadly nonsense, like: Jump off a cliff and the gods will make you fly.
This is a vital point: people try to infect each other with those memes which they find most appealing, regardless of the memes objective value or truth. Further, the carrier of the cliff-jumping meme might never actually take the plunge; they may spend the rest of their long lives infecting other people with the meme, inducing millions of gullible fools to leap to their deaths. Historically, this sort of thing is happening all the time (like Hitler sending his country into oblivion). Whether memes can be considered true life forms or not is a topic of some debate, but this is irrelevant: they behave in a way similar to life forms, allowing us to combine the analytical techniques of epidemiology, evolutionary science, immunology, linguistics, and semiotics, into an effective system known as memetics. Rather than debate the inherent truth or lack of truth of an idea, memetics is largely concerned with how that idea gets itself replicated. Memetics is vital to the understanding of cults, ideologies, and marketing campaigns of all kinds, and it can help to provide immunity from dangerous information-contagion s.
You should be aware, for instance, that you just been exposed to the Meta-meme, the meme about memes
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