The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment

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Selfishness is like a wall. A useless wall, without a doubt. It cannot hold one’s own joy in. But simply keeps the world’s joy out” Atran, Scott (2002). In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195149302.

The word was coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. [14] [20] Examples of memes given in Dawkins' book include melodies, catchphrases, fashion, and the technology of building arches. [21]

The Evolving Use of 'Meme'

Memes can replicate vertically or horizontally within a single biological generation. They may also lie dormant for long periods of time. This dictionary defines Dawkins' sense of meme as "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture." The word wasn't entered until 1998, when it earned a spot in an update of the Tenth Edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. Although Dawkins had coined the word in a 1976 book, it was more than 20 years before the accumulation of examples of the word in use demonstrated that it was a fully established term in the language. Here's the kind of evidence that paved the way for the word's dictionary debut: 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] The critical point is that these three steps: variation, selection and heredity, can be understood as a simple three-step algorithm, the evolutionary algorithm. This is ‘Darwin’s dangerous idea’, a ‘universal acid’ that rips through all other explanations. “a scheme for creating Design out of Chaos without the aid of Mind.” (Dennett 1995, 50). It was the generality of this scheme that Dawkins wanted to emphasise; ‘Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene” (1976 p 191). He wanted “to claim almost limitless power for slightly inaccurate self-replicating entities, once they arise anywhere in the universe” (Dawkins 1989 p 322).

Well, not really. The study, which combined a series of behavioral experiments and brain scans, didn’t suggest that anyone, in the lab or elsewhere, had found sharing on Facebook to be an orgasmic experience. What it did suggest was that humans may get a neurochemical reward from sharing information, and a significantly bigger reward from disclosing their own thoughts and feelings than from reporting someone else’s. Saussure, Ferdinand de 1959. Course in general lingusitics. C. Bally, & S.W. Albert (eds.), W. Baskin (trans.). New York: Philosophical Library. https://archive.org/stream/courseingenerall00saus/courseingenerall00saus_djvu.txt (accessed 23 March 2019). Search in Google Scholar Benitez Bribiesca, Luis (January 2001). "Memetics: A Dangerous Idea" (PDF). Interciencia: Revista de Ciencia y Technologia de América. 26 (1): 29–31. ISSN 0378-1844. Archived (PDF) from the original on 20 September 2018 . Retrieved 11 February 2010. If the mutation rate is high and takes place over short periods, as memetics predict, instead of selection, adaptation and survival a chaotic disintegration occurs due to the accumulation of errors. Kilroy was here" was a graffito that became popular in the 1940s, and existed under various names in different countries, illustrating how a meme can be modified through replication. This is seen as one of the first widespread memes in the world. [30]

The Selfish Gene

Brodie, Richard (1996). Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme. Seattle, Washington: Integral Press. p.251. ISBN 9780963600110. Meme isn't new: it dates to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene, where it functioned with a meaning other than its current most common one. In Dawkins' conception of the term, it is "a unit of cultural transmission"—the cultural equivalent of a gene: These people always think first about themselves and are greedy by nature. It’s heartbreaking to come across fake friends who can betray you anytime, so always take time to trust people. #SelfishQuotes

Dawkins, Richard (2004). A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love. Boston: Mariner Books. p.263. ISBN 9780618485390. Farnish, Keith (2009). Time's Up! An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis. Totnes: Green Books. p.256. ISBN 9781900322485. Dawkins's gene-selectionism has been criticised by many authors (myself included, Mameli 2004) and for many reasons (sometimes good, sometimes not so good). But the importance of The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype is undeniable. In those books, Dawkins summarised and developed some new strategies for thinking about evolutionary processes that authors like William D. Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, and George C. Williams had elaborated in the previous decades. Dawkins's writings contributed to the spread of these important ideas and engendered an interesting debate about the relative merits of different conceptions of biological change. My opinion is that gene-selectionism has some important limitations (and, thereby, mischaracterises in some important ways biological evolution) but is an interesting (and sometimes useful) way of looking at evolutionary processes. Can we say the same about meme-selectionism? Can The Selfish Meme do for culture what The Selfish Gene did for biology? R. Evers, John. "A justification of societal altruism according to the memetic application of Hamilton's rule". Archived from the original on 6 October 2018 . Retrieved 26 July 2013. Miszei-Ward, Rachel. 2012. Politics, race, and political fly-billing. Comparative American Studies 10. 177–187. 10.1179/1477570012Z.00000000013 Search in Google ScholarDawkins initially defined meme as a noun that "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation". [21] John S. Wilkins retained the notion of meme as a kernel of cultural imitation while emphasizing the meme's evolutionary aspect, defining the meme as "the least unit of sociocultural information relative to a selection process that has favorable or unfavorable selection bias that exceeds its endogenous tendency to change". [41] The meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless of whether that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme. A meme could consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech in which that word first occurred. This forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single unit of self-replicating information found on the self-replicating chromosome. Deacon, Terrence W. (2004). "Memes as Signs in the Dynamic Logic of Semiosis: Beyond Molecular Science and Computation Theory". Conceptual Structures at Work. "Lecture Notes in Computer Science" series, no. 3127. Vol.3127. Berlin / Heidelberg: Springer. pp.17–30. doi: 10.1007/978-3-540-27769-9_2. ISBN 9783540223924. Archived from the original on 17 March 2023 . Retrieved 17 March 2023. Although Richard Dawkins invented the term meme and developed meme theory, he has not claimed that the idea was entirely novel, [23] and there have been other expressions for similar ideas in the past. [24] Huxley, T. H. (1880). "The coming of age of 'The origin of species' ". Science. 1 (2): 15–20. doi: 10.1126/science.os-1.2.15. PMID 17751948. S2CID 4061790.

Dennett, Daniel C. (1995). Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster. Richard Dawkins first proposed his version of cultural evolutionary theory in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. The main thrust of that book was a defence of the gene as the unit of biological selection and the organism as a “survival machine” for its genes. Towards the end, however, he added his view that culture also evolves and that “memes” are the units of cultural selection. Memetics is the name of the field of science that studies memes and their evolution and culture spread. [51] While the term "meme" appeared in various forms in German and Austrian texts near the turn of the 20th century, Dawkin's unrelated use of the term in The Selfish Gene marked its emergence into mainstream study. Based on the Dawkin's framing of a meme as a cultural analogue to a gene, meme theory originated as an attempt to apply biological evolutionary principles to cultural information transfer and cultural evolution. [52] Thus, memetics attempts to apply conventional scientific methods (such as those used in population genetics and epidemiology) to explain existing patterns and transmission of cultural ideas. [53] If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and simulation, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Search in Google ScholarHewitson, O. 2010. What does lacan say about… desire? In Lacan Online. http://www.lacanonline.com/index/2010/05/what-does-lacan-say-about-desire/ (accessed 21 September 2020). Search in Google Scholar