The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment

Product Information

If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Kilroy was here" was a graffito that became popular in the 1940s, and existed under various names in different countries, illustrating how a meme can be modified through replication. This is seen as one of the first widespread memes in the world. [30] LEFERVE: Girard created the baby to show off his animation software. It worked. Now, zillions of the copies of the diapered dancer animate computer screens across the Internet.

Hull, David L. (2001). "Taking memetics seriously: Memetics will be what we make it". In Aunger, Robert (ed.). Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science (1sted.). Oxford University Press. pp.43–67. ISBN 9780192632449. Dennett, Dan. 2002. Dan Dennett on dangerous memes. In TED Ideas Worth Spreading. https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_dangerous_memes (accessed 21 September 2020). 10.1037/e597252010-001 Search in Google Scholar These people always think first about themselves and are greedy by nature. It’s heartbreaking to come across fake friends who can betray you anytime, so always take time to trust people. #SelfishQuotes Dennett, Daniel (2006). Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Viking (Penguin). ISBN 9780670034727. Kelly, Kevin (1994). Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World. Boston: Addison-Wesley. p. 360. ISBN 9780201483406.

Fracchia, Joseph; Lewontin, Richard (February 2005). "The price of metaphor". History and Theory. 44 (1): 14–29. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2005.00305.x. ISSN 0018-2656. JSTOR 3590779. The selectionist paradigm requires the reduction of society and culture to inheritance systems that consist of randomly varying, individual units, some of which are selected, and some not; and with society and culture thus reduced to inheritance systems, history can be reduced to 'evolution.' ... We conclude that while historical phenomena can always be modeled selectionistically, selectionist explanations do no work, nor do they contribute anything new except a misleading vocabulary that anesthetizes history. Let me start by explaining what memetics is and where it comes from. Memetics is one possible way of using Darwinian evolutionary ideas to study culture. As I shall explain below, it is not the only way of doing this. According to memetics, the essence of culture is constituted by memes and the essence of cultural change is constituted by changes in meme frequencies. Memes are mental states that embody discrete chunks of socially transmissible information. To say that the information that memes embody is socially transmissible is to say that memes can give rise to other memes through social learning. To say that memes embody a discrete chunk of information is to say that, when the information present in a meme is socially transmitted, such information does not usually blend with the information present in other memes. On this view, social transmission is (at least at its most fundamental level) a copying process in which memes generate copies of themselves. Memes are thought to be socially transmissible beliefs, desires, values, and mental representations of tunes, stories, myths, rituals, ways of doing (or saying, or thinking about) things, etc. According to some versions of memetics, it is not just socially transmissible mental states that deserve to be classified as memes, but also those artefacts and activities (including those of a linguistic and textual nature) that can be copied and that can result in the existence of similar artefacts or activities. 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. Putting yourself first is not selfish. Thinking about yourself constantly is selfish. Please respect the difference” Dubuc, B. n.d. Tool module: Chomsky’s universal grammar. In The Brain From Top to Bottom. http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/capsules/outil_rouge06.html (accessed 17 March 2019). Search in Google Scholar

Atran, Scott (2001). "The Trouble with Memes" (PDF). Human Nature. 12 (4): 351–381. doi: 10.1007/s12110-001-1003-0. PMID 26192412. S2CID 1530055. Archived (PDF) from the original on 30 October 2021 . Retrieved 8 October 2021. theory ( Freud 1922 1959, Redl 1949, Wheeler 1966, Ritter and Holmes 1969, Levy and Nail 1993) and deindividuation has not only been of an experimental nature ( Bandura, et al., 1963, Wheeler and Caggiula 1966, Wheeler and Levine 1967, Wheeler and Smith 1967, Goethals and Perlstein 1978), but Millikan, Ruth Garrett (2004). Varieties of Meaning: The 2002 Jean Nicod Lectures. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262134446.

About the Author

Heylighen, Francis. "Meme replication: The memetic life-cycle". Principia Cybernetica. Archived from the original on 4 October 2018 . Retrieved 26 July 2013.

These days meme is evolving semantically again, which seems like an appropriately meme-y thing to do. We've spotted it functioning as a verb: themselves in the gene pool by hopping from body to body via eggs and sperm. Memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by hopping from brain to brain, by a process... The idea that biological change can be explained by appealing to transmission and selection factors was Darwin's idea. This idea has been elaborated in many important respects in the last 150 years, but Darwin's original insight has withstood the test of time. Biological change is best understood in terms of a Darwinian evolutionary system, a system where the composition of populations is determined by a combination of transmission and selection factors. The same is true of cultural change. Cultural change is best understood in terms of a system where the (cultural) composition of populations is determined by a combination of (cultural) transmission and selection factors. Culture is a Darwinian evolutionary system. In this fast-moving world, it’s difficult to come across true and honest friends. We often bump into fake people and friends who pose to be our close ones, but should not be trusted.Selfish people also tend to have victim mindsets… Their actions plant seeds of loneliness; then they cry upon the blooming.” – Steve Maraboli Distin, Kate (2005). The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment. Cambridge University Press. p.238. ISBN 9780521606271. Dawkins, Richard (1989). "11. Memes: The new replicators". The Selfish Gene (2nded.). Oxford University Press. p.368. ISBN 9780192177735. Cannizzaro, Sara (31 December 2016). "Internet memes as internet signs: A semiotic view of digital culture". Sign Systems Studies. 44 (4): 562–586. doi: 10.12697/SSS.2016.44.4.05. ISSN 1736-7409. S2CID 53374867. Archived from the original on 1 February 2023 . Retrieved 23 January 2023.

GREG LEFERVE, CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Who is this tyke, slashing his air guitar, dancing the boogaloo (ph) and haunting "Ally McBeal?" He's a figment of Michael Girard's imagination. The word ‘meme’ was coined in Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Although, more than forty years on, most people associate memes with the notion of Internet memes, it is helpful to return to Dawkins’ original definition to understand the theory of memetics and its differences from other theories of cultural evolution. Dawkins cites as inspiration the work of geneticist L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, anthropologist F. T. Cloak, [27] [28] and ethologist J. M. Cullen. [29] Dawkins wrote that evolution depended not on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmission—in the case of biological evolution, the gene. For Dawkins, the meme exemplified another self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.Claude I. Salem, The New York Times Magazine, 17 Apr. 2011 The Internet and a New Meaning of 'Meme' Eco, Umberto. 1976b. A theory of semiotics. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. 10.1007/978-1-349-15849-2 Search in Google Scholar The concept of memes is derived from the principles of universal Darwinism; that whenever information is copied with variation and selection, that information is a replicator and inevitably evolves. The core definition of a meme is ‘that which is imitated’. Genes are the first replicator; memes the second replicator that emerged when human ancestors became capable of imitating sounds and actions. Criticisms of memetics include claims that they do not exist, that the analogy with genes is false, that the units cannot be specified, that there is no clear equivalent of the germ line in biology, and that the sources of variation are intelligently designed rather than random. Reasons for rejecting these criticisms are discussed. For memetics, memes are selfish replicators that evolve for their own benefit, while other theories of cultural evolution look to biological advantage, providing very different accounts of the origins of the large human brain and language. Imitation is observed in song birds, cetaceans and great apes but animal cultures may arise through forms of social learning other than true imitation and are not memetic. Overimitation in children as compared with other great apes may be important in providing memetic advantage. The possibility of a third replicator, technological memes or tremes, is briefly considered. The Harvard researchers—Diana Tamir, a grad student in psychology, and Jason Mitchell, her adviser—performed functional MRI scans on 212 subjects while asking them about their own opinions and personality traits, and about other people’s. Neuro­imaging of this sort can reveal which parts of the brain are being activated; in this case, the researchers found that the mesolimbic dopamine system—the seat of the brain’s reward mechanism—was more engaged by questions about the test subject’s own opinions and attitudes than by questions about the opinions and attitudes of other people. The system has long been known to respond to both primary rewards (food and sex) and secondary rewards (money), but this was the first time it’s been shown to light up in response to, as the researchers put it, “self-­disclosure.”