The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment

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Memes are, simply put, ideas that catch on. This book is, not so simply, a collection of memes in essay form …, written by self-proclaimed off-planet journalist Rheingold. Eco, Umberto. 1976a. Peirce’s notion of interpretant. Comparative Literature 91(6). 1457–1472. https://doi.org/10.2307/2907146. Search in Google Scholar Archive Librarian. 2015. Bereshit Ranbbah. The ethics of suicide digital archive. https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/selections/bereshit-rabbah/ (accessed 21 September 2020). Search in Google Scholar At first blush, the notion that the self-disclosure impulse is somehow good for the species might seem counterintuitive. If all we did was prattle on about ourselves, we’d soon bore one another to extinction. Why would we have evolved to get a rush of pleasure from hearing ourselves talk?

JANELLE BROWN, WIRED NEWS: And the next thing you know, his friends have forwarded it on and it's become a net meme. Memes, analogously to genes, vary in their aptitude to replicate; successful memes remain and spread, whereas unfit ones stall and are forgotten. Thus, memes that prove more effective at replicating and surviving are selected in the meme pool. [ citation needed] Let me start by explaining what memetics is and where it comes from. Memetics is one possible way of using Darwinian evolutionary ideas to study culture. As I shall explain below, it is not the only way of doing this. According to memetics, the essence of culture is constituted by memes and the essence of cultural change is constituted by changes in meme frequencies. Memes are mental states that embody discrete chunks of socially transmissible information. To say that the information that memes embody is socially transmissible is to say that memes can give rise to other memes through social learning. To say that memes embody a discrete chunk of information is to say that, when the information present in a meme is socially transmitted, such information does not usually blend with the information present in other memes. On this view, social transmission is (at least at its most fundamental level) a copying process in which memes generate copies of themselves. Memes are thought to be socially transmissible beliefs, desires, values, and mental representations of tunes, stories, myths, rituals, ways of doing (or saying, or thinking about) things, etc. According to some versions of memetics, it is not just socially transmissible mental states that deserve to be classified as memes, but also those artefacts and activities (including those of a linguistic and textual nature) that can be copied and that can result in the existence of similar artefacts or activities. Chandler, Daniel & Rod Munday. 2011. A dictionary of communication. Oxford: Oxford Reference. 10.1093/acref/9780199568758.001.0001 Search in Google Scholar 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. [48]Miszei-Ward, Rachel. 2012. Politics, race, and political fly-billing. Comparative American Studies 10. 177–187. 10.1179/1477570012Z.00000000013 Search in Google Scholar Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.

Trivers, R. L. (1972). Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell (Ed.), Sexual selection and the descent of man (pp. 136–179). Chicago: Aldine.

As an example, John D. Gottsch discusses the transmission, mutation and selection of religious memeplexes and the theistic memes contained. [50] 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. 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. [54] Criticism of meme theory Selfishness is a trait that can have a significant impact on our personal and professional relationships. Dawkins, Richard (1982). The Extended Phenotype. Oxford University Press. p.109. ISBN 9780192860880. Graffiti have been the elemental memes of political speech, from the walls of Pompeii to the New York subways to the Berlin Wall, in all the oppressed countries of this world.

Dennett, Daniel C. (1995). Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster. Deacon, Terrence. "The trouble with memes (and what to do about it)". The Semiotic Review of Books. 10: 3. Quotes about selfishness can offer insight into the consequences of this behavior and provide guidance on how to deal with it. Best Selfish Friends and Mean People Quotes We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory,' or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'. There are many selfish people who are extremely original, then they take those pure ideas and use them to raise themselves up, that is an insincere move.” – Daniel SmithThe Harvard researchers—Diana Tamir, a grad student in psychology, and Jason Mitchell, her adviser—performed functional MRI scans on 212 subjects while asking them about their own opinions and personality traits, and about other people’s. Neuro­imaging of this sort can reveal which parts of the brain are being activated; in this case, the researchers found that the mesolimbic dopamine system—the seat of the brain’s reward mechanism—was more engaged by questions about the test subject’s own opinions and attitudes than by questions about the opinions and attitudes of other people. The system has long been known to respond to both primary rewards (food and sex) and secondary rewards (money), but this was the first time it’s been shown to light up in response to, as the researchers put it, “self-­disclosure.” Lacan, Jacques 1985. Sign, symbol, imaginary. In M. Blonsky (ed.), On signs, 201–209. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Search in Google Scholar upon which they depend. Internal hobgoblins of mind ( Cialdini 1988) or homunculi ( Dennett 1991) with all sorts of Eco, Umberto. 1976b. A theory of semiotics. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. 10.1007/978-1-349-15849-2 Search in Google Scholar

Researchers in this tradition do what serious memeticists should have done. They attempt to base their theory of cultural change on empirically grounded assumptions about cultural transmission, cultural innovation, and population processes, and they test their models by looking at whether they have any genuine predictive power. These models are sometimes not as explanatorily successful as one would hope. But despite the difficulties, this approach -- in stark contrast with memetics -- is a productive research programme and keeps generating interesting results. Salingaros, Nikos (2008). "Architectural memes in a universe of information". Theory of Architecture. Umbau-Verlag. ISBN 9783937954073. Motivational: ideas that people adopt because they perceive some self-interest in adopting them. Strictly speaking, motivationally transmitted memes do not self-propagate, but this mode of transmission often occurs in association with memes self-replicated in the efficiency parental, proselytic and preservational modes. Selfishness comes from poverty in the heart, from the belief that love is not abundant.” – Don Miguel Ruiz Dawkins, Richard. 2016. The selfish gene: Fortieth anniversary edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Search in Google Scholar

The Selfish Gene

Shalizi, Cosma Rohilla. "Memes". Center for the Study of Complex Systems. University of Michigan. Archived from the original on 11 June 2012 . Retrieved 8 October 2021. Cognitive: ideas perceived as cogent by most in the population who encounter them. Cognitively transmitted memes depend heavily on a cluster of other ideas and cognitive traits already widely held in the population, and thus usually spread more passively than other forms of meme transmission. Memes spread in cognitive transmission do not count as self-replicating. Our cultural life is full of things that seem to propagate virus-like from one mind to another: tunes, ideas, catchphrases, fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. In 1976 I coined the word meme (rhymes with cream) for these self-replicating units of culture that have a life of their own. Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker". academic.oup.com . Retrieved 1 May 2023. In this fast-moving world, it’s difficult to come across true and honest friends. We often bump into fake people and friends who pose to be our close ones, but should not be trusted.