What is Memetics?
Memetics, a pseudoscience stemming from Darwinism, attempts to explain how cultural ideas are spread amongst people. The theory explains that memes are ontological units that replicate in organisms and spread from one host to the other (cultural spread). Similar to genetics, the properties and roles of memes are analogous to genes. Who Created the Idea? The idea of memetics was first proposed in 1976 by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. Comparing memes to genes, he proposed that the cultural ideas that humans have are in fact transmitted information that behave similar to a virus. In his paper Viruses of the Mind, Dawkins used the spread of religion as an example of how memes spread. Children, who are more susceptible to the “virus” of religion, most likely follow the religion of their parents because the child is an acceptable host for the meme virus. People that followed this new theory stratified into two groups. Internalists believed that memes were units of cultural information that can be copied and located in the brain, externalists believed that memes were observable cultural behaviors. To learn more about internalists and externalists, click the button below. |
Here is a video explaining memes in depth by susan blackmore
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Susan Blackmore, a strong supporter of memetics, lectures about memes and her new idea "temes". Temes are memes that live in technological artifacts instead of the human mind.
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but, why?
Culture is spread through the interaction of people and by passing information from person to person. By saying that this transferal of knowledge is through replication of memes in the brain, memeticists are arguing that the cultural and philosophical ideas that an individual has is not based on personal choice, but on how well they are a host for that particular meme. This theory also will explain how some cultures and ideas spread rapidly and successfully while others tend to disintegrate. Memetics can be considered a science because it explains how culture spreads based on transmission and replication.
Sources:
Darwin, C., & Quammen, D. (2008). On the origin of species. New York: Sterling.
Dawkins, R. (1989). The selfish gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dawkins, R. (n.d.). Viruses of the mind Richard Dawkins. Retrieved November 3, 2014, from http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind.html