On memes

[drkitten]

One would first have to establish memes as a scientific discipline - something that has not been done. Memes are a conjecture, nothing more.

Huh? I don't think I understand you here.

First, memes will never be a "scientific discipline," any more than cats, or levers, transistors will. They may become an object of study of a scientific disicpline, just as cata are an object of study by biology, levers by physics, and transistors by electrical engineering.

But the existence of "memes" is fairly well-established. The original defintion of "meme" (Dawkins, 1976; 1989) is simply "the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission." That culture is transmitted is uncontroversial; that culture is transmitted partially by replication is also uncontroversial, and the individual ideas are termed 'memes.'

So there is rather obviously a meme (or meme complex) for atheism, since I could teach the basic beliefs and arguments of atheism to you and thereby convince you to believe those ideas.

 

[drkitten]

But that wasn't quite what Dawkins described as a meme was it? He was suggesting (if I remember right) that "they" had something akin to a "gene", in other words they would be subject to the theory of evolution just like a gene is.

Yeah, that's also pretty uncontroversial, if you think about it.

If I have a religious belief that demands that I go out and spread the Word (the Great Commission), the belief will be more widely replicated than a religious belief that demands that I keep the mystery a secret. Which is part of why there are more Christians today than Zorastrians. The belief structure of Zoastrianism demands that it not be shared except with blood relatives....

We've also seem the same effect, in a lesser way, with jokes. I hear probably ten jokes a day. The only ones I retell are the ones I find funny (that's called natural selection). Sometimes I garble the joke when I retell them, usually to the detriment of the joke, but sometimes to its improvement (that's called mutation). The successful mutations become even funnier and are even more widely retold. And soon everyone knows the one about the pirate walking into a bar with a steering wheel sticking out of his trousers....

 

[c4ts]

There are memes on JREF. I win the debate!

 

[Tricky]

Is there a meme for atheism?
Is there a meme for believing in memes?

As I understand it a meme is just a concept for a thought that has the potential to be passed to others. As such, every communicated thought has a meme. For a variety of reasons, some last a long time. Some last only an instant before that thought is forgotten and never communicated again. Not all memes that survive a long time are necessarily beneficial.

 

[Tricky]

Yeah, that's also pretty uncontroversial, if you think about it.

If I have a religious belief that demands that I go out and spread the Word (the Great Commission), the belief will be more widely replicated than a religious belief that demands that I keep the mystery a secret. Which is part of why there are more Christians today than Zorastrians. The belief structure of Zoastrianism demands that it not be shared except with blood relatives....

We've also seem the same effect, in a lesser way, with jokes. I hear probably ten jokes a day. The only ones I retell are the ones I find funny (that's called natural selection). Sometimes I garble the joke when I retell them, usually to the detriment of the joke, but sometimes to its improvement (that's called mutation). The successful mutations become even funnier and are even more widely retold. And soon everyone knows the one about the pirate walking into a bar with a steering wheel sticking out of his trousers....

I heard "Cockney with a steering wheel sticking out of his trousers..." I guess that meme has mutated a bit. Cockney is funnier because pirates don't drive.

 

[drkitten]

I heard "Cockney with a steering wheel sticking out of his trousers..." I guess that meme has mutated a bit. Cockney is funnier because pirates don't drive.

Cockney is funnier, but geographically bound (I know a lot of Yanks, Canucks, Aussies, and Kiwis who wouldn't know "Cockney" if they were watching My Fair Lady.. With non-English speaking cultures it's almost hopeless; try telling a joke about regional English accents to a Frog....). It might have mutated the other way to allow wider distribution....

 

[JamesDillon]

My main gripe is that I'm yet to see research building on the ideas of memes and applying them in context. As soon as I start seeing some testable predictions coming out I'll be happy with thinking of it as a real field.

Have you read Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine? She takes a stab at making falsifiable predictions on the basis of memetic theory, and not surprisingly given the premise of the book, finds them borne out by observations. I would elaborate, but it's been a while since I read the book and I don't really remember exactly what the predictions are, and I don't have it handy.

 

[Robin]

First, memes will never be a "scientific discipline," any more than cats, or levers, transistors will.

Picky, picky – memetics is not a scientific discipline.

But the existence of "memes" is fairly well-established. The original defintion of "meme" (Dawkins, 1976; 1989) is simply "the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission." That culture is transmitted is uncontroversial; that culture is transmitted partially by replication is also uncontroversial, and the individual ideas are termed 'memes.'

You mean in the sense that it is a new name for something that we already know about – well yes. But if I dreamed up a new name for gravity I would not therefore have started a new scientific discipline.

But you have severely misrepresented Dawkins – go back and read the whole chapter. The idea of a meme is that it is a sort of cultural analog to a gene – that the main driver of cultural transmission is blind natural selection and that memes ‘literally parasytise’ the brain. Susan Blackmore goes further – here are some examples: “ Our "self" was created by and for the memes. “Creativity and foresight owe more to memetic evolution than to individual brilliance. “

Extraordinary ideas require extraordinary evidence.

So please point me at the hard research – the predictions – the experimental evidence.

 

[Robin]

Yeah, that's also pretty uncontroversial, if you think about it.

If I have a religious belief that demands that I go out and spread the Word (the Great Commission), the belief will be more widely replicated than a religious belief that demands that I keep the mystery a secret. Which is part of why there are more Christians today than Zorastrians. The belief structure of Zoastrianism demands that it not be shared except with blood relatives....

We've also seem the same effect, in a lesser way, with jokes. I hear probably ten jokes a day. The only ones I retell are the ones I find funny (that's called natural selection). Sometimes I garble the joke when I retell them, usually to the detriment of the joke, but sometimes to its improvement (that's called mutation). The successful mutations become even funnier and are even more widely retold. And soon everyone knows the one about the pirate walking into a bar with a steering wheel sticking out of his trousers....

But if the meme conjecture is to be true this has to be a general principle. Bach didn't compose the Brandenburg Concerto by playing a bum note in an existing tune that happened to sound better than the original.

 

[Jekyll]

Have you read Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine? She takes a stab at making falsifiable predictions on the basis of memetic theory, and not surprisingly given the premise of the book, finds them borne out by observations. I would elaborate, but it's been a while since I read the book and I don't really remember exactly what the predictions are, and I don't have it handy.

No. I'm not a fan of her work from the little I've read and from the paper I mentioned earlier (and which references her work): "Probably the most serious criticism of memetics is that it has not yet produced any empirically verifiable predictions."

As far as I can tell state of the art research in memetics is currently back-fitting, finding results and then showing that they are consistant with the theory of memes.

 

[hammegk]

As far as I can tell state of the art research in memetics is currently back-fitting, finding results and then showing that they are consistant with the theory of memes.

I.E. Her study is as firmly based as the meme of neo-Darwinism.

 

[Jekyll]

I.E. Her study is as firmly based as the meme of neo-Darwinism.

Hardly. I can predict that no mammal, fish or reptile is going to spontaneously grow feathers in a single generation.

 

[drkitten]

But you have severely misrepresented Dawkins – go back and read the whole chapter. The idea of a meme is that it is a sort of cultural analog to a gene – that the main driver of cultural transmission is blind natural selection and that memes ‘literally parasytise’ the brain.

Erm,no.

At least, I can't find a single sentence in The Selfish Gene that supports what you said above. In the slightest degree.

If I'm missing some important paragraph, please point it out to me.

 

[FireGarden]

Beerina

I have a meme in my mind I haven't seen "out in the wild", and have been debating whether to release it to see if it grows, as an experiment.

I also have a meme in mind that I haven't seen "out in the wilderness". I've been considering whether to keep it locked up and see if it withers away... As an experiment!

 

[Robin]

Erm,no.

At least, I can't find a single sentence in The Selfish Gene that supports what you said above. In the slightest degree.

If I'm missing some important paragraph, please point it out to me.

Erm - chapter 11 for example? But it would help if you could tell me which part couldn't you find support for "in the slightest degree"?

That Dawkins intended the concept of memes as a cultural analog of the gene?

But do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicator and other, consequent, kinds of evolution ? I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.
The new soup is the soup of human culture

I conjecture that co-adapted meme-complexes evolve in the same kind of way as co-adapted gene-complexes. Selection favours memes that exploit their cultural environment to their own advantage. This cultural environment consists of other memes which are also being selected. The meme pool therefore comes to have the attributes of an evolutionarily stable set, which new memes find it hard to invade.

Or that Dawkins intended the blind natural selection property of genetic transmission to be part of this analogy?

Let us pursue the analogy between memes and genes further. Throughout this book, I have emphasized that we must not think of genes as conscious, purposeful agents. Blind natural selection, however, makes them behave rather *as if* they were purposeful, and it has been convenient, as a shorthand, to refer to genes in the language of purpose. For example, when we say `genes are trying to increase their numbers in future gene pools', what we really mean is `those genes that behave in such a way as to increase their numbers in future gene pools tend to be the genes whose effects we see in the world'. Just as we have found it convenient to think of genes as active agents, working purposefully for their own survival, perhaps it might be convenient to think of memes in the same way. In neither case must we get mystical about it. In both cases the idea of purpose is only a metaphor, but we have already seen what a fruitful metaphor it is in the case of genes. We have even used words like `selfish' and `ruthless' of genes, knowing full well it is only a figure of speech. Can we, in exactly the same spirit, look for selfish or ruthless memes ?

Much more probably, unconscious memes have ensured their own survival by virtue of those same qualities of pseudo-ruthlessness that successful genes display.

Maybe you are taking task with the "literally parasitise" part of my post - certainly Dawkins is quoting a colleague here but he appears to approve of the idea:

If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.'

So Dawkins intended memes as analogs of genes - that they are driven by blind natural selection and they literally parasitise the brain.

But what on earth do you think the chapter is about? Do you think that Dawkins is devoting an entire chapter of his book to simply finding a new name for an existing and well known concept?

 

[Robin]

My main gripe is that I'm yet to see research building on the ideas of memes and applying them in context. As soon as I start seeing some testable predictions coming out I'll be happy with thinking of it as a real field.

Edit: Ah, here we are it's starting to happen.
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/MemeOperationalization.pdf

This pretty much bears out what I said, memetics is not a scientific discipline. Thirty years after the introduction of the concept people are still making suggestions about what memetics research might look like if it were ever to happen.

There has been no shortage of these kinds of papers - the "here is a hypothesis we might test and here is how we might test it" has been grist to the memetics mill for a couple of decades at least. But it never seems to be followed up by actual research along the lines it recommends. And by the way I read the paper and could not find the non-trivial testable prediction.

The fact is the idea never gained any real acceptance in scientific circles. The Journal of Memetics folded last year because of lack of quality submissions and in it there is an article by Bruce Edmonds suggesting why this is. In part he says:

I claim that the underlying reason memetics has failed is that it has not provided any extra explanatory or predictive power beyond that available without the gene-meme analogy.* Thus whilst the idea of memes has retained its attractiveness for some in terms of a framework for thinking about phenomena, it has not provided any "added value" it terms of providing new understanding of phenomena.*

I could not put it better.

 

[c4ts]

I heard "Cockney with a steering wheel sticking out of his trousers..." I guess that meme has mutated a bit. Cockney is funnier because pirates don't drive.

Pirates don't drive, they commandeer!