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The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment

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Stanovich, Keith E. (2004). The Robot's Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226770895.

A decade into the future, and hiphop has thrown its code indiscriminately into the meme pool—it is immanent, endemic, ubiquitous. Stang, Nicholas F. 2018. Kant’s transcendental idealism. In Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism (accessed 21 March 2019). Search in Google Scholar Researchers in this tradition do what serious memeticists should have done. They attempt to base their theory of cultural change on empirically grounded assumptions about cultural transmission, cultural innovation, and population processes, and they test their models by looking at whether they have any genuine predictive power. These models are sometimes not as explanatorily successful as one would hope. But despite the difficulties, this approach -- in stark contrast with memetics -- is a productive research programme and keeps generating interesting results. Petrova, Yulia (2021). "Meme language, its impact on digital culture and collective thinking". E3S Web of Conferences. 273: 11026. Bibcode: 2021E3SWC.27311026P. doi: 10.1051/e3sconf/202127311026. ISSN 2267-1242. S2CID 237986424.A field of study called memetics [10] arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model. Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that academic study can examine memes empirically. However, developments in neuroimaging may make empirical study possible. [11] Some commentators in the social sciences question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units, and are especially critical of the biological nature of the theory's underpinnings. [12] Others have argued that this use of the term is the result of a misunderstanding of the original proposal. [13] Heylighen, Francis. "Meme replication: The memetic life-cycle". Principia Cybernetica. Archived from the original on 4 October 2018 . Retrieved 26 July 2013. Aaron Lynch attributed the robustness of religious memes in human culture to the fact that such memes incorporate multiple modes of meme transmission. Religious memes pass down the generations from parent to child and across a single generation through the meme-exchange of proselytism. Most people will hold the religion taught them by their parents throughout their life. Many religions feature adversarial elements, punishing apostasy, for instance, or demonizing infidels. In Thought Contagion Lynch identifies the memes of transmission in Christianity as especially powerful in scope. Believers view the conversion of non-believers both as a religious duty and as an act of altruism. The promise of heaven to believers and threat of hell to non-believers provide a strong incentive for members to retain their belief. Lynch asserts that belief in the Crucifixion of Jesus in Christianity amplifies each of its other replication advantages through the indebtedness believers have to their Savior for sacrifice on the cross. The image of the crucifixion recurs in religious sacraments, and the proliferation of symbols of the cross in homes and churches potently reinforces the wide array of Christian memes. [40] Biological evolution is a change in the statistical distribution of biological (phenotypic or genetic) traits within a population (or a set of populations). Whether and how this statistical distribution changes can be explained in terms of two sets of factors (and of the interactions between them): transmission factors and selection factors. Let us consider them in turn. Organisms are causally connected with their descendants by means of what are sometimes called "inheritance channels". These channels are transmission factors. Genetic transmission is the most important of these channels but -- as I have argued elsewhere (Mameli 2004) -- it is not the only one. These causal connections between the generations are responsible for the extent to which (and for the way in which) organisms resemble their offspring. Thereby, such causal connections affect the extent to which (and the way in which) the statistical distribution of a trait in a given generation depends on the statistical distribution of that trait (or some related traits) in the previous generation. Explanations of changes in the distribution of traits that appeal to selection factors, in contrast, refer not to the features of inheritance channels but to the way biological traits affect the chances that organisms have of surviving and reproducing. Selection occurs when a trait increases in frequency because it makes the organisms that possess it more likely to do things that result -- through reproduction -- in the existence of other organisms with the same trait. As Bill Wimsatt has pointed out, the distinction between transmission factors and selection factors is in some cases blurred (Wimsatt 1999), but in general it provides a theoretically fruitful way of analysing biological change. Our cultural life is full of things that seem to propagate virus-like from one mind to another: tunes, ideas, catchphrases, fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. In 1976 I coined the word meme (rhymes with cream) for these self-replicating units of culture that have a life of their own.

Say the word meme and the average English speaker is likely to have any variety of images spring to their mind—perhaps a photo of a furious baby with a caption about some indignity of corporate life, or an image of a voluminous cat who is clearly having none of it. Meme as we most often encounter it these days is used to refer to "an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video)," as our definition puts it, "that is spread widely online especially through social media." Choe, J.C. (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior, (2nd ed.). vol. 1, pp. 67–74. Elsevier, Academic Press.What the study really illustrated, then, was a paradox: when it comes to information, sharing is mostly about me. The researchers weren’t trying to answer the thornier question of why—why, as they wrote, our species might have “an intrinsic drive to disclose thoughts to others.” The paper nonetheless points to an intriguing possibility: that this drive might give us humans an adaptive advantage.

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