Wat is the whole "meme" idea about? It seems to me to be a probably misleading analogy between genes and huiman or animal communication. Take for instance these letters I have written. Of course it may be tempting to compare the reading proces with cells "reading" DNA, but tempting is not the same as justified. So is the "meme" idea "real"? (Is it a R. Dawking idea? - Like "selfish gene" - perhaps misleading too?)
They are as real as religion and hand shaking. They are merely facets of our minds and behavior. They have nothing to do withing biology, I think this is more of a philosophy questions, the closes they come to biology is that memes have a form of evolution, but this evolution is not like biological evolution, it is more like the pseudolamarckian evolution that technology and societies follow.
Actually the idea wasnt that mems are like DNA, it was that mems are like VIRUS's in the way they infect culture. For instance ask people in australia to sing the vegimite song and most of them will, same with the airoplane jelly song. This isnt to say they are all bad, Lorry Lorinces "kids alive, do the five" would be concidered a mem but as its one designed SPECIFICALLY to save lives its anything but harmfull. There are heeps of health ones out there but one that comes imidiately to mind is the stroke one, "FAST" (Facial weakness, Arm weakness, Speach difficulty, Time to call an ambulance). I admit i did have to look that up because im taught differently from the public campaine
Many memes exist purely for the purpose of being humorous or rather they are funny and therefore repeated.
Still doubting "memes". Perhaps then we could abandon "memes" and just talk about minds and behavior? Perhaps we do not after all need the idea of "memes"? But as far as I know the very idea come from biologists! Perhaps making "philosophy" of their own!(should they, or is it poor philosophy?) And then one migt ask if these assumed similarities between "ideas" ("memes")and viruses are real or only apparent. Those who claim they are real please come up with some reasoning!
Prions were first proposed by a mathematician, that does not make it mathematics. Meme are a subjected of behavior, might as well say we should abandon body language and just talk about behavior, or we should abandon spoons and just talk about silverware.
What I doubt is that the idea of "memes" in any ways help us understand human relations in broadest sense, but if I am wrong, please tell me exactly in what ways this idea give us new insights! As I se it it is very unclear what a socalled "meme" is suppesed to be, and what it is not. If we compare a transfer of ideas with a virus or "prions", what excactly then is supposed to be similar? Perhaps there may even be a problem the other way round. We may see genetics too much as a proces similar to something we know from daily life (at least so I remember books about biology from school age, long time ago).
A meme is a useful metaphor, it goes beyond just talking about the mind. It is an idea or story that can mutate over time, that becomes more appealing to a certain culture. Like a virus, if it hits upon a variation that is particularly suited to us, it has the potential to change us. Religion is like that. Meme describes the way an idea can move through the culture in a way that a simple idea cannot.
You can talk about memes, as long as you don't start talking about genes as memes [from the metaphor of memes as genes] and confuse the one with the other. In my experience, they tend to confuse more people about genes than educate them.
I doubt people use the vague "meme" meme to educate people about genes very often. Most of the work in educating people about genes consists of blocking the human mind's natural tendency to comprehend them as some kind of meme-like agent (in the sense of evolving via Lamarckian patterns, etc) and starting out by reinforcing that confusion would hardly appeal to the educator. In the same line, I don't see too many using memes to educate people about viruses either. It's the other way around, mostly. That they are coherent entities capable of replication and dispersal in certain environments. And that they compete with similar entities for replication and dispersal resources in those environments.
My response then is: I simply doubt this is good psycology, or any other meaningfull human science. There is not much simple "replicating" like genes are assumed to do, in human learning - I have some doubts even that human imitating each other have any deeper similarity with "gene replicating". The only thing is the later may allso be more complex than we sometimes hear about. It is about analogies, but perhaps there is some traps in such analogies (like in the idea of "selfish genes". The later may not be taken too litterally either).
We do replicate memes be repeating them, passing the idea to another, often in subtly changed ways that make it more virulent. The least infectious memes dissapear, the most infectious (the ones most appealing to our character or able to resist scientific inquiry) proliferate.
It's kind of an excuse for responsible living, then? The idea that we can just say we were only responding to the group mind? But it doesn't say much new does it? Even Al J reports "...because of rockets from Gaza that have been launched at Israeli towns"; this has replaced the previous "...Illegal Israeli towns on occupied territory" phrase, just over the last year or so. They repeat the "western meme", I suppose.
Not really. What target audience would that be ? Gregory Bateson once complained about people trying to count "double binds" in a given situation. That was common, but didn't make the idea of a double bind worthless. Some ideas are difficult. If one approach doesn't work with a given audience, try another. The idea is not of humans imitating each other, but of coherent entities that at least partly constitute human culture replicating and dispersing. But if you don't like the concept, and it doesn't help you, don't use it. I found it handy for thinking about the latest political campaign, among other arenas of employment.
First of all, I don't see it as much more than a analogy that may bring an interesting perspective on cultural evolution, on how it may evolve "by itself" rather than being under our control, as may be perfectly intuitively acceptable. The similarities with viruses are, that, like them, culture/memes are not in our DNA, you can pass your culture not only to your biological children, but to other people, it's called "horizontal transmission". It can also evolve in "detachable" parts, or modularly, instead of each cultural "entity", or whatever fills the concept of "meme" in more standard jargon, necessarily being more static/monolithic. As in a sort of "cultural creationism", where cultures are unrelated -- I'm not suggesting that the idea that culture evolves and has degrees of relatedness didn't exist before Dawkins meme meme. But perhaps the analogy might help understand how the internal "semantics" or struture of a culture may not matter much for it evolution. One could argue that a certain people that believe X could never had this concept from an Y predecessor because it's illogical from the Y paradigm, but seeing it in a more "organic" fashion it's more or less like saying that cats have an intrinsic "catness" that could never had evolved from a common ancestor of dogs. Perhaps it help us to see that some cultural changes could not have been so sophisticated as they might appear to have been based on the divergences; instead, it could be largely due to accidents of cultural replication, where the ancestral "paradigm" ceases to impose a constraint to the evolution of contrasting, but yet closely related ideas. But perhaps more importantly that it can evolve "by its own", not necessarily because it's useful for us (as would be the expected misleadingly intuitive notion), but just because they "fool" us into reproducing them. The idea can be based on false or useless information, and yet, portray itself as something real and important, which leads to replication. Sometimes just uselessly, sometimes even harmfully. That is, essentially a biological analogy with the fact that bad ideas can happen and can be highly popular despite of being bad, because being good is not a requirement for being popular, as could be a natural overestimated expectation for products of our minds. One thing that often is used as a criticism against the concept is that it would be just some sort of detrimental comparison of religion with viruses, but it's not quite that. Not only it does not apply solely to religion, or solely to bad things, but for culture in general. And despite of being "viruses of the mind", religions can also be argued to have positive, "mutualistic/symbiotic" aspects, not being just purely nocive, independently of their fundamental statements about the supernatural being true or not. Ironically, once I saw someone criticizing the concept, saying that it's a terrible, virulent idea. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
It can be an analogy as You say. analogies probably can be usefull tools for understanding, but I have this nasty suspicion they can allso sometimes give us "erratic understanding", especially if we more or less automatically accept them (as probably pupils or students tend to do, if they not happen to be very interested, just get through their lessons and exams.). Sorry, but that seems to me to be a dissimilarity? Viruses are as far as I have heard genetic material (I forget if it´s DNA or RNA, but does that matter in our discussion?) No, Would anybody suggest that? Caution! Are "cultures" a sort of "entities" with "internal "semantics" and structure"? Like an organism or its genetic material? I think we should not accept that without noticing that human "culture", way of life, beliefs, are very different from say cells or chromosomes. Few would disagree that not all what we learn in widest sense is "good" or "usefull" for us. Still we may ask ourselves if it may be not too easy to "blame" some "virulent cultural structures". I admit in some way the idea may appeal very much to our imagination (I can almost see small nasty cultural microbes invading me and other persons - but I suspect this vision is far from true!). what is "good" and "bad" may not be very clear in this context. For me that is another reason for reservation or caution.It give an impression of an idea that "explains everything" (regarding human minds)- fit in everywhere, at least potentially.
