I'm wondering if there's some information about its use; when it started making the rounds I can add a little to wwh's link, eta... I first read it in the same book, 'The Selfish Gene'. It was a path breaking book that came out in the seventies and has gone into innumerable editions and reprints since. A fascinating concept, amongst many, that he espoused in the book, was that of memes. It was a bird from NZ, Max, and its song (I forget thename) that first ignited this theory. Memes are meant to rhyme with gene and just like genes are the units of biological evolution/heredity, memes are the units of cultural evolution. (Language & Instinct over in miscellany come right in!
) Memes are ideas, catch phrases, songs, poetry, folklore, fashion; anything that is transimtted down the generations culturally, not by heredity and that itself evolves as well as spawns evolution. Think about it....an idea evolves over time; the same idea also changes the way we think!
.......Strong examples are religion, faith, and folklore.
Dawkins calls all life forms on earth,
survival machines, and strongly argues the case for ruthless selfishness as the dominant attribute necessary for a successful gene. Primordial life was dominated by a molecule called the
'Replicator' - one that had the unique capacity for making copies of itself. Genes and DNA are their modern equivalent. In the primordial soup, there was a finite limit to how many replicators could be housed and to endure the intense competition for survival, different features aimed at increasing longevity and propagation were developed and the successful ones naturally went on to stay and replicate further. Successful replicators also needed to protect themselves from the physical onslaught of the environment and therefore started first by building walls of protein around themselves; they now had a nicely walled home, much like a hoarding (
Hi Bill!) and turned themselves into a composite unit called a survival machine. These early protective membranes, walls and coats steadily got bigger and more complex and slowly but surely morphed into body shapes of viruses, bacteria, amoebae, plankton, plants, animals and, yes! the human body too! This is where the lady in Quinion's site, comes in with her comment on the brain and memes....the brain is the survival machine of the memes!!
According to Dawkins, the three features that determine a successful gene/meme/replicator:
longevity, fecundity and copying fidelity. For a gene or, in case of a meme, an ideology, fashion, thought, behaviour, song, etc., to be transmitted over generations, they should be able to survive, they should propagate/proliferate rapidly and they should be true copies or close. It is in the last trait, copying fidelity, that the meme theory and its similarity to genes comes a little unstuck. One has only to think of first hand information, second hand stories, hearsay, to understand the weakness of memes with copying. But, Dawkins explains that away by dividing both genes and memes into units, large and small, the
essence and the interpretation. That is to say, that even if an idea has mutated in transmission, the essence of the idea that is the true copy, demonstrates copying fidelity in tranmission. It is only the interpretations that are not exact imitations of the original. The true meme is the essence and is transmitted rather faithfully; the interpretations are therefore mere distractions from the original.
Hope I didn't bore you guys; it just is a most fascinating subject and I have a problem with droning on about stuff like this, if given half a chance!
