Most of the memes that make up human culture are of the shoemaking kind. Once the informational boundary is crossed, biological models of replication and survival become applicable. Memes (groups form culture, stabilized by meta-memes)ĭNA (informational though embedded in material) The diagram below is in terms of increasing complexity.
Human culture is a vast collection of memes, a memetic ecosystem. This process is analogous to the way willow genes cause willow trees to spread them,or perhaps closer to the way cold viruses make us sneeze and spread them.Ĭollections of organisms make up ecosystems.
Memetics provides rational explanations for a lot of seemingly irrational human behavior.Ī meme survives in the world because people pass it on to other people, either vertically to the next generation, or horizontally to our fellows. If you come to understand memetics, I expect your view of politics, religions, and related social movements to be changed in much the same way the germ theory of disease changed the attitude of the medical profession about epidemics. The study of memetics takes the old saw about ideas having a life of their own seriously and applies what we know about ecosystems, evolution, and epidemiology to study the spread and persistence of ideas in cultures. I will use memes, ideas, replicating information patterns, and beliefs as similar terms in this article. "Beliefs," especially organized and promoted beliefs, are memes, or, depending on how you think about them, cooperating groups of memes. An idea which fails to propagate beyond the person who first thinks of it is not a meme. "Meme" is close to "idea," but not all ideas are memes. The new study is called memetics after "meme" (which rhymes with cream)."Meme" is a coined word from a Greek root for memory, and purposefully similar to "gene." Dawkins devoted the last chapter of his earlier book, The Selfish Gene, to defining memes and discussing the survival of these replicating information patterns within the meme-pool (roughly culture). Dawkins this line of thinking led to a new way to view the spread and persistence of the ideas that make up human culture. About a decade ago in the mind of the same Dr. For example, seemingly "altruistic" behavior of worker bees is now understood as a consequence of the improved survival of the "selfish" DNA they share with the queen. The paradigm of life as the propagation of genetic information and of Darwinian evolution as resulting from the selective survival generation after generation of some part of that information is an outgrowth of the computer age.This paradigm has led to a number of remarkable advances in evolutionary biology. It couldn't be any plainer if it were raining floppy disks." That's not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It is raining instructions out there it's raining programs it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading algorithms. They are there because their ancestors succeeded in doing the same. Those fluffy specks are,literally, spreading instructions for making themselves. Not just any DNA, but DNA whose coded characters spell out specific instructions for building willow trees that will shed a new generation of downy seeds.
The paragraph ends: "The whole performance, cotton wool, catkins, tree and all is in aid of one thing and one thing only, the spreading of DNA around the countryside. Richard Dawkins, perhaps the foremost evolutionary biologist of our times, starts Chapter 5 of his recent book, The Blind Watchmaker with "It's raining DNA outside." He goes on to describe a willow tree that is shedding fluffy seeds far and wide across the landscape. "If you would understand politics, study evolution first." -H. The measure is not what people, but what ideas win." -Morton C. "For philosophically committed people, politics is primarily a contest over public policy. For paper publication permission, contact author
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