A lot of people I know believe that ideas and concepts are things called 'memes' (a concept created by Dawkins), and that ideas and concepts evolve and become extinct in the same way as biological organisms do, in accordance with Darwinian ideas of evolution (if I'm correct about the idea). I'm a bit suspicious of this. I'm wondering if there are any among you that feel the same as me about this meme idea, or if I am rejecting something which is accepted by almost everyone?
Evolution of the mind is fact. The concept that you brought up, ideas are in a sense separate entities from the ones constructing them, is very thought provoking to me. If you think about a very common meme of the past it can serve as an example of an idea that no longer worked and due to it not being most apt to surviving dismissal, it was replaced. The idea that I'm referring to is the nature of the world; it's rotation, location in the universe and ultimately it's shape. In today's society we have seen the movement towards the eradication of ideas of racism as truth as well as traditional ideas regarding homosexuals. The history of Marijuana prohibition can be seen as the evolution of an idea. Going from misconceptions and lies , eventually making way for skepticism, and finally to truth.
Just checking out Wikipedia, it seems that you are not alone in your skepticism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme#Cr...of_meme_theoryOriginally Posted by Silas Thorne
Thinking about the idea of a "meme" as something inside your brain that replicates itself through teaching and imitation makes me wonder what this entity is made out of?
I'm not opposed to the existence of entities that are not part of our matter-energy reality, but I don't think the proponents of memetics expect us to view them as angels or devils or some various kinds of spirit guides. But that is what they sound like, unless there is some matter-energy foundation for the entities. That, I suspect, is the objection to memetics that Luis Benitez-Bribiesca is making when he calls memetics a pseudoscientific dogma in the Wikipedia article cited above although I haven't read his original paper.
Last edited by YesNo; 10-03-2011 at 08:40 AM.
In the brief summary at that Wikipedia link, I don't see any objections to the "physical existence of memes", but rather to their definition (or the usefulness of their conceptual role). We see ideas replicate, spread, die away, etc., but they don't have an internal code (like DNA). So a meme is different from a gene in that way, and thus perhaps genetics (and all of the processes involved in genetics) is not a suitable metaphor for them. There is also, at the end, an objection made by a semiotician, who seems to basically think that memes sort of make a mess of a conceptual system he's already been involved in (but he isn't wondering about what the material manifestation of memes would be, because it would be of the same nature as the signs that he speaks of).
When people study or talk about memes, there should be no question about what memes are made of: they are made of brain cells, ink on paper, sound waves, etc., even made of something like (in a "famous" Susan Blackmore example) the triangular fold at the end of a roll of toilet paper in a freshly cleaned hotel bathroom. To wonder where memes materially exist, and to be skeptical on such a basis, is similar to wondering where ideas and traditions materially exist and therefore being skeptical about those.
Last edited by billl; 10-03-2011 at 01:14 PM.
I thought this thread was about internet memes.
So is it all definition then, whether someone chooses to call an idea or culturally-inherited trait a 'meme' ? Anthropologists and sociolinguists can talk about the influence of geography and other contraints on the development of particular civilisations and cultures, and not mention the word.
Perhaps my problem is viewing ideas and cultural artifacts as 'memes,' that behave in the same way as genetic information. And actually, to view the whole of history in terms of what actions and behaviours were evolutionary successful for us as a species, as some evolutionary psychologists do, seems pretty strange, and sometimes rather awful to me.
A Meme is an abstraction. Just like god. But with more substance behind it. Still it is only a theoretical concept.
It looks like "meme" is a new way of saying "idea" or "word" with the added feature that memes provide an external entity that is responsible for human communication, like a photon provides the means for the transmission of light.
Here is a Susan Blackmore talk where she mentions the triangular fold on toilet paper: http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_black...and_temes.html
However, there seems to be something internally contradictory with the idea of memes being independent entities running the show: on the one hand, they are portrayed as wanting to use us to get replicated; on the other, they can't possibly want to do anything because all they are is information.
Among these talks there is one by Michael Pollan, http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_pol..._eye_view.html, which is about plants, in particular, grasses. Both Pollan and Blackmore describe external entities they claim are trying to manipulate us to replicate them.
I find Pollan's ideas more realistic than Blackmore's because plants are definitely living entities outside of the ideas in our minds and it is easy to see how plants could conceivably care enough to do whatever is in their power to manipulate us to replicate them. How that manipulation occurs is mysterious, but so is how we are able to communicate at all with each other.
Blackmore is a quack. Do we really think ideas have some form of 'mind' and wish to attach themsleves to be replicated!!! Dawkins idea is a metaphor really,he even says so himself.
Plants obviously have some instinct to attach to certain materials. But i think 'manipulate' is too strong a word and 'humanises' the plant. Anthromorphism run wild...
Blackmore's talk was entertaining and Halloween is coming up. It makes for a good ghost or meme story.
I also don't see how plants manipulate us, but I have been amazed by the relationship between some orchids and wasps which makes me think the orchid is deliberately messing with the wasp to get itself replicated: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h8I3cqpgnA
So how does the orchid know what will turn on the wasp?
How does one orchid get the bright idea to imitate a wasp and then tell other orchids to do the same thing so this kind of pollination can occur?
I once read, but can't remember where, that orchids have such beautiful flowers because they know we like them. So they "manipulate" us, as some do to the wasp, to move them to a nursery and replicate them.
Regardless whether plants are doing any of this deliberately, they at least might conceivably have a motivation to use us. Memes, and likely genes as well, have no motivation since they are just information.
Last edited by YesNo; 10-07-2011 at 10:25 AM.
Yes,i can agree with all of that. I just think the world 'manipulate' is a little strong. The plant has obviously learned 'fishing' for its needs from experience.
While thinking about memes it occurred to me that the "selfish gene" may be just as fanciful as the meme. That is, it may not exist at all. This is not to say that genes don't exist. They do. What doesn't exist is selfish information, selfish computer control files, selfish memes, genes, temes that are trying to manipulate us to replicate themselves.
When I found that the copies of Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene were checked out of the local library, I ran into Niles Eldredge's Why We Do It: Rethinking Sex and the Selfish Gene where he basically stated back in 2004 what I thought was an original idea of mine.
Here is a quote to tempt you to explore the interactions of economics, reproduction and sex from an evolutionary standpoint, but without Dawkins' over-emphasis on reproduction, aka "replication", if you happen to be a piece of information:
It is even harder to see (and a bit ludicrous to believe) how bits of information encoded as genes on chromosomes can in any meaningful sense "care" about leaving relatively more copies of themselves to the next generation. The selfish gene is a metaphor predicated on the assumption that the purpose of life is to reproduce. Au contraire: if life can be said to have a purpose at all, it is simply to live.
Im more into the 'mans will-power is supreme school'. I think genes are just certain patterns identified by scientists,the 'effect' so to speak. Man is the ultimate cause. (Tempered by the physics around him,of course.)
All these theories are excuses to say behaviour is determined by 'material causes'. Hogwash. Every newborn baby disproves these theories by its unique personality,characteristics and fearsome displays of independent will.
The gene-centric view of selection follows inevitably from what we know of biology now. You are misunderstanding the concept, it is not that the genes "manipulate" us to replicate themselves, it is simply that the basic unit of selection is the gene and not the organism. Thus, we go back to the concept of the survival of the fittest organism, and we have to think about the survival of the fittest genes.
The gene-centric view opens up new avenues for explaining what we see in nature, like kin-selection, which is vital for explaining the evolution of eusocial insects like bees and ants, and may explain certain altruistic behaviours in humans. It also helps us understand the evolution of viruses, how we understand horizontal gene transfer in bacteria, and how we can understand cases of co-evolution, like the emergence of eukaryotic life from endosymbiosis.
Also, replication and reproduction are not the same thing, genes do not reproduce, only organisms reproduce, and reproduction when it is sexual does not result in replication of the parent organisms.
That doesn't disprove anything. I'm curious how you think varied personalities and individuality somehow contradict materialism. Behaviour is determined by a combination of, to borrow loosely from Steven Pinker, many aspects: their genes (determine the building blocks of the potential future brain), the anatomy of their brain (brain damage causes personality changes, and of course linked with the genes), the current physiology of their brain (think stress hormones, depression), their developmental history (maternal hormones, childhood malnutrition, early education), their life history (learned and cultural attributes, which also effects the developmental history, which in turn can effect the physiology and the anatomy of the brain), and of course the current environment at any given moment (we behave differently with a gun in our face vs. when we're watching tv, don't we?).
Last edited by OrphanPip; 10-17-2011 at 01:27 PM.
"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
- Margaret Atwood
I don't think I'm following your argument.
I'm getting the term "replication" from Susan Blackmore. I find the term odd as well. The only thing I know about her, however, is from the video I cited earlier, but she seems to be someone who promotes memetics which is what this thread is about: http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_black...and_temes.html
In the introduction to her talk she said: "We are the ones who let the second replicator out of the box." The first replicator was the gene.
One of the criticisms that Niles Eldredge makes against Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene is that sexual reproduction is not an efficient way to replicate an individual's genes and should not have evolved if genes were truly "selfish". If genes were selfish, reproduction would have been all asexual.
So, just a couple of questions to see if we basically agree or disagree.
1) Do you believe that genes are "selfish"?
2) Do you believe in "memes"?
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