memetics.txt

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	produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far behind
	anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet, including the emergence
	of the living cell.

Molecular biologist Jacques Monod in the last chapter of _Chance and Necessity:
 An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology_ began to explore the
evolution of ideas.

For a biologist it is tempting to draw a parallel between the evolution of
ideas and that of the biosphere.  For while the abstract kingdom stands at
a yet greater distance above the biosphere than the latter does above the
nonliving universe, ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms.
Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can
fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in
this evolution selection must surely play an important role.  I shall not
hazard a theory of the selection of ideas.  But one may at least try to define
some of the principal factors involved in it.  This selection must necessarily
operate at two levels:  that of the mind itself and that of performance.

The performance value of an idea depends upon the change it brings to the
behavior of the person or the group that adopts it.  The human group upon
which a given idea confers greater cohesiveness, greater ambition, and
greater self-confidence thereby receives from (the idea) an added power to
expand which will insure the promotion of the idea itself.  Its capacity to
'take," the extent to which it can be 'put over' has little to do with the
amount of objective truth the idea may contain.  The important thing about
the stout armature a religious ideology constitutes for a society is not what
goes into its structure, but the fact that this structure is accepted, that it
gains sway.  So one cannot well separate such an idea's power to spread from
its power to perform.

The 'spreading power' -- the infectivity, as it were, -- of ideas is much
more difficult to analyze.  Let us say that it depends upon preexisting
structures in the mind, among them ideas already implanted by culture, but
also undoubtedly upon certain innate structure which we are hard put to
identify.  What is very plain, however, is that the ideas having the highest
invading potential are those that explain man by assigning him his place in
an immanent destiny, in whose bosom his anxiety dissolves.

Monod refers here to the pool of ideas present in human culture as "the
abstract kingdom.  Douglas R. Hofstadter in his book _Metamagical Themas:
Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern_ (New York:  Basic Books,
1985; New York:  Bantam Books, 1986) suggests the word "ideosphere" instead,
in closer analogy to "biosphere."

In the last chapter of his book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins further develops
this notion.  He defines a meme as a replicating information pattern that
uses minds to get itself copies into other minds; it is the basic unit of
replication and selection in the ideosphere.  The word meme is taken from
the same Greek root as the word memory; a memory is a more-or-less organized
collection of memes and other things.  Memes float about in the soup of human
culture where they grow, replicate, mutate, compete, or become extinct.
Dawkins writes:

	"Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions,
	ways of making pots or of building arches.  Just as genes propagate
	themselves in the gene pool by leading from body to body via sperm
	or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping
	from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be
	called imitation.  If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea,
	he passes it on to his colleagues and students.  He mentions it in his
	articles and his lectures.  If the idea catches on, it can be said to
	propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain."

Dawkins then quotes the comments of a colleague, N. K. Humphrey, on a
draft by Dawkins:

	"...memes should be regarded as living structures, not just
	metaphorically but technically.  When you plant a fertile meme in
	my mind, you literally parasitize by 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 (people) the world
	over."

It is important to note here that, in contrast to genes, memes are not
encoded in any universal code within our brains or in human culture.  The
meme for vanishing point perspective in two-dimensional art, for example,
which first appeared in the sixteenth century, can be encoded and
transmitted in German, English or Chinese; it can be described in words, or
in algebraic equations, or in line drawings.  Nonetheless, in any of these
forms, the meme can be transmitted, resulting in a certain recognizable
element of realism which appears only in art works executed by artists
infected with this meme.

Jokes are an interesting group of memes.  Because the recipient of a joke can
collect nearly as much reward each time he passes the joke on to yet another
recipient as he received when first hearing the joke, jokes are very fecund
memes, and very infective as well.

Given that memes are encoded in many different ways, it is not surprising
that memes also occur in species other than Homo sapiens.  Some species of
birds learn a neighborhood repertoire of songs, rather than inheriting
them.  Such birds, raised from hatchlings with other species, will sing only
in the foreign throat.  Humpback whales learn songs from one another, and
chimpanzees pass on the art of fishing termites from their nests with long
twigs or reeds from generation to generation.

Of course, not all ideas are memes.  A passing thought which you never
mention to anyone else, or an idea which no one else ever takes an
interest in, is not self-replicating.  On the other hand, I first
encountered the meme about memes four or five years ago, and that meme
is tonight attempting to infect each of you as well.  In a science article
in ANALOG magazine appearing in August 1987, space activist Keith Henson
wrote:

	"The important part of the "meme about memes" is that memes are
	subject to adaptive evolutionary forces very similar to hose that
	select for genes.  That is, their variation is subject to selection
	in the environment provided by human minds, communications channels,
	and the vast collection of cooperating and competing memes that make
	up human culture.  The analogy is remarkably close.  For example,
	genes in cold viruses that cause sneezes by irritating noses spread
	themselves by this route to new hosts and become more common in the
	gene pool of a cold virus.  Memes cause those they have successfully
	infected to spread the meme by both direct methods (proselytizing)
	and indirect methods (writing). Such memes become more common in the
	meme pool."

In the title of this essay, I referred to memetics as a science, albeit one
in a very early and poorly developed stage.  What does it take for a field
of study to deserve the name "science?"  Without getting too rigorous about
this question, two factors are of major importance here.  First, does the
putative "science" explain a diversity of phenomena by a small number of
underlying principles or laws or theories?  In other words, a science is not
merely a vast catalog of facts or case histories, although most sciences,
especially the natural sciences, have gone through a stage of amassing such
data before any patterns emerged with sufficient clarity to permit the
formulation of theories which would account for large portions of those data.
Second, are these laws or theories testable?  To be testable, a theory must
make predictions about phenomena which have not previously been considered in
devising the theory.  If observations match the predictions, then the theory
stands.  If the observations differ from the predictions, then the theory
must be either modified until it fits both the old data and the new, or
discarded.

The science of information theory, which has developed during the past half
century as an outgrowth of the needs of the telecommunications industries;
the cryptographic needs of military services; and the burgeoning field of
artificial intelligence research, basically says that, regardless of the
specific content of information a message may have, and regardless of the
particular method of encoding that message, certain universal laws apply to
the copying and transmission of the information.  If memetics has any
substance, then, we should expect that phenomena observed among genes should
have analogs among memes.  Let us consider briefly then a few of the things
we understand in the biosphere and see if there are analogs in the
ideosphere.  Consider first epidemiology, the study of the transmission of
pathogens, disease-causing microorganisms.

It is fairly easy to find phenomena in the propagation of memes in the
ideosphere analogous to the spread of pathogens.  While some pathogens can
infect only by direct contact (such as most sexually transmitted diseases),
others are usually transmitted by intermediaries, usually called "vectors."
The Girl Scouts in my earlier example were infected with malaria transmitted
by mosquitos which had previously bitten the Vietnam veteran while he as in
the throes of a malarial relapse.

Similarly, some religious memes are very difficult to transmit except by the
force of personal example at close quarters.  Other memes, particularly those
of a commercial nature, like "Things go better with Coke," are very
effectively transmitted by the vectors of modern electronic media.

Occasionally, a pathogen may be successfully suppressed in most places, but
survive in a few tiny pockets or reservoirs until the large environment is
once more susceptible to infection.  Tuberculosis is one such disease;
reservoirs of the bacillus can survive among the fringes of society or even
in tiny calcified spots within a particular person, who will show no
symptoms of the disease until his or her immunological resistance is
weakened by malnutrition or another disease.  Most of the intellectual and
esthetic memes of classical Greece were "lost" for a millennium, surviving
only in tiny reservoirs in the monastic communities of Ireland until the
Renaissance made it possible for these memes to again infect significant
numbers of people.

A correct understanding of some of the mechanisms involved can be very
important to survival of human genes.  Thus, for example, human cultures
had little or no success in combatting epidemics of the plague, smallpox,
or malaria, to name a few, while the dominant meme (which survived for over
five centuries in Western civilization) of the miasma theory of diseases
held sway.  With the advent of the germ theory (a meme which corresponds
more closely to reality), quarantine measures, innoculation and immunization,
and suppression of vectors (like rates, mosquitos, or contaminated water
supplies) finally enabled human genes to compete more successfully against
the genes of the germs.

A major problem in the United States today is drug abuse among teenagers
and young adults.  The growth curves for numbers of drug abusers have the
same shape as the curves for influenza epidemics or for AIDS, and efforts
up to now in the war against drugs have been about as successful as were
public health measures based on the miasma theory.  The drug-abuse meme,
since it is particularly prevalent among teenagers and young adults and