“Meme” is an idea that spreads across social groups, coined by Richard Dawkins in 1996. Memes compete with other memes for attention and reproduce more efficiently than others. They create behaviors or structures optimized for their own survival and prosperity. Memes are often defined as neurological patterns within the human brain, but can also be represented in art, culture, and science. Memetics is a growing field with its own journals, researchers, and techniques.
Coined by popular science writer Richard Dawkins in 1996, a “meme” is any idea that spreads across social groups. It was coined as a variant of the “gene”. While genes in nature struggle to outrun rival genetic sets, memes in social environments compete with other memes for our attention. The “meme” view of cultural evolution sees the totality of human ideas as an ecology of self-propagating, mutating, evolving entities. The growing protoscience surrounding memes is called “memetics.”
Without experiencing the changes as they pass from one mind to another, memes could not evolve. By analogy with biological evolution, these changes are called “mutations,” although the underlying dynamics of genetic and memetic mutation are radically dissimilar. While genes and memes may work very differently, they share some similarities.
One thing genes and memes have in common is differential self-replication. Some genes and memes reproduce more efficiently than others, which means they outnumber rival variants. These variants become the context within which the next round of mutant variants will compete.
While neither genes nor memes are independently self-aware, they “selfishly” create behaviors or structures optimized for their own survival and continued prosperity, not necessarily that of the host. In memetics, cults are often used as an example of this. Of course, memes and genes can contribute to the survival and continued prosperity of the host, but only to the extent that they aid its own replication. Genes and memes also operate in parasitic and symbiotic arrangements. In the same way that gene complexes, or organisms, exploit or help each other according to their specific niche, meme complexes – worldviews – develop similar strategies according to their ability to propagate.
Physically, memes are often defined as neurological patterns within the human brain, although art, culture, science, and other man-made structures are often thought to carry memes or represent memes in the outside world. While memetics is sometimes criticized as a rebranded incarnation of sociology or group psychology, the field has its own journals, researchers, and techniques that set it apart from historical disciplines. The term “meme” has become an infectious meme itself, appearing in many popular magazines and books on marketing, business, and psychology.
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