Are Memes Taking Over?

[GreyICE]

Zippers? Useful idea. People are happy to make them and use them in a variety of situations. Velcro? Useful idea, with even wider usefulness. Orange pigments and dyes? Useful in a variety of situations, the ideas men have conceived for making and improving them will be preserved in the tiny sliver of humanity employed in doing such things, but those ideas will never gain a foothold in most minds. The color orange itself will be widely employed, from bags to labels to fashion to road cones. "Orange will propagate if it can" will remain a nonsense statement.

It becomes doubly silly when one attempts to introduce a new buzzword, "temes," to personify the technology we use to store and distribute ideas.

Stretching the metaphor to suggest that humanity may just be a transitional species in danger of being subjugated by our new teme overlords is the kind of idea that only deserves to be seriously discussed by freshmen at 3 AM in the fanciful philosophy dorm. I can't believe that woman got invited to TED.

Now hold up a second. There is an oft-repeated quote about people and intelligence. It talks about how individuals can be bright, interesting, witty, and overall great. But people? Masses of people are invariable stupid.

The social gestalt is definitely an interesting phenomena. Information propagation. What causes the social gestalt to act in ways that no one individual would cause? Take riots. If you put most of the rioters in a voting booth and asked them 'riot?' you'd probably get 95% no, 5% yes. Angry? Sure. Want to do something about it? Sure. Riot and loot? They'd sit there and tell you 'no, I wouldn't.' And yet they do. Why? What triggered it?

Certainly information propagates through the social gestalt in a way that is hard to predict, much less control. And while the strawman of 'meme overlords' is obviously worthless, the concept that certain ideas have the power to hijack society for a time is powerful. Certainly marketing attempts to tap exactly that frequently, looking to create memes, social patterns, crazes.

 

[Beerina]

An organism is it's body...and its behaviors. Increased brain size allowed for learning via imitation and via association (discovery). So suddenly behavior could pass on to the next generation without wasting time evolving it into a genetic instinct.

It picks up the pace of organism evolution several magnitudes faster than sexual reproduction did, itself a vast improvement in scouring the fitness gradient descent space.

It's not that hard, nor is it illogical or a poor model of a system. It is not an analogy. It is what it is.

 

[RandFan]

Anthropologists have been doing this for a long time before the word "meme" was invented. The idea (sorry, meme?) that cultures, or humans or social groups can adopt certain ideas that others have adopted isn't new. The new change to describing this as memetics actually ignores many other reasons for this that have nothing to do with idea favorability. One state conquering another and requiring the conquered to follow its ideas doesn't have much to do with natural selection of ideas (within only the context of ideas fighting each other for survival). Certain societies deciding to start raising animals for consumption may have more to do with their crops failing from flooding than it does with any "meme" of any sort, for another example. Memetics seems pretty reductionist.

A meme isn't so much a packet of digital information as it is an additional bit of information in a dictionary, imo. If Blackmore's point is that she invented a new word, then I don't disagree with her.

I don't understand your argument. Why do some ants farm aphids and some don't? Was it evolutionary pressures? Yes.

You are making a fundamental mistake about evolution. Evolution isn't a ladder that goes from good to better. Evolution is more like a tree or streams of water finding the course of least resistance. One society conquering another is a great example of evolution. That one society could conquer the other is proof that there were memes that were more fit for survival. It couldn't get any more straight forward.