Meme

• 1. Introduction

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  The word meme was coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. He trimmed it from mimeme, a form built on the Ancient Greek mimeisthai, meaning to imitate, so that it would echo the word gene. The Greek root mīmēma means 'imitated thing'. Dawkins offered melodies, catchphrases, fashion and the technology of building arches as examples. Each of them travels from one mind to another by being copied. In everyday speech today, the word usually means an image that people remix and pass around online. The original proposal was far more ambitious. It asked whether ideas could replicate, mutate and compete, the way genes do. Can culture evolve by natural selection? How do you count an idea, and where does one idea stop and the next begin? And why do so many scholars say the whole comparison between ideas and genes is misleading?

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• 2. Forerunners and Inspirations

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  In 1880, T. H. Huxley wrote that "The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world." He added that a theory is a kind of thinking, and that its right to exist depends on its power to resist extinction by rivals. Dawkins never claimed the notion was entirely new, and this passage shows why.

  G. K. Chesterton made a similar observation in 1922. He saw intellectual systems as resembling living organisms, and he noted that a certain degree of complexity is a necessity for survival rather than a hindrance.

  A German-language thread ran alongside these English ones. In 1904, Richard Semon published Die Mneme, which appeared in English in 1924 as The Mneme. Maurice Maeterlinck used the same term in The Life of the White Ant in 1926, with some parallels to Dawkins's concept. Source texts also note that Dawkins's use of the word was unrelated to these earlier German and Austrian uses.

  Kenneth Pike supplied a different ancestor in 1954. He coined the terms emic and etic, generalizing linguistic units such as the phoneme, morpheme, grapheme, lexeme and tagmeme that Leonard Bloomfield had set out. His terms separated an insider's view of communicative behavior from an outsider's.

  Dawkins credited the geneticist L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, the anthropologist F. T. Cloak and the ethologist J. M. Cullen as direct inspirations. His central claim was that evolution does not depend on the chemistry of DNA. It needs only some self-replicating unit of transmission, and the gene was merely the case biology happened to discover first.

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• 3. The Rules of Selection

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  Dawkins named three conditions that must exist before evolution can occur. There must be variation, meaning new change introduced into existing elements. There must be heredity, meaning the capacity to make copies. And there must be differential fitness, meaning one element can be better suited to its environment than another. He stressed that whenever all three coexist, evolution follows, and it is not limited to organic material.

  From this he argued that memetic evolution is a real process under natural selection, not just a handy analogy. People play the role of hosts, much as bodies are hosts for genes. A successful meme therefore may or may not give any benefit to the person carrying it.

  A culture's tool designs make the point concrete. A people who develop distinctive tool-making methods may gain an edge over another people, and the design's usefulness affects whether it survives into later generations.

  Dawkins also reflected on lasting influence. He wrote that a good idea "may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool." He added, quoting a remark by G.C. Williams, "Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G.C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong."

  Cultural inheritance differs from the genetic kind in one respect. Learning to hammer a nail by watching a teacher does not require copying every stroke. Susan Blackmore calls exact copying of the instructions the Darwinian mode, and copying the product the Lamarckian mode.

  Memes also travel in packs. Memeplexes are clusters of memes that replicate together and coadapt, such as cultural or political doctrines. A new meme that fits inside a successful memeplex can gain acceptance by piggybacking on its success.

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• 4. Routes of Transmission

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  Adam McNamara proposed splitting memes into two kinds, internal and external, which he called i-memes and e-memes. The split follows how a copy moves. It can pass directly between nervous systems through communication or imitation. Or it can pass indirectly through a recorded copy in an inanimate source, such as a book or a musical score.

  Before a meme can spread, it must be kept. The longer a meme stays in its hosts, the better its chances of propagation. Reusing the neural space that holds one meme to hold a different one is the greatest threat to that copy. Hosts are mortal, so retention alone cannot sustain a meme. It also has to move to new minds, either vertically between generations or horizontally within one, and some memes lie dormant for long periods.

  Some commentators compare this spread to contagion. Fads, hysteria, copycat crime and copycat suicide are their examples of imitated ideas. They treat yawning and laughing differently, because those are innate rather than socially learned.

  Aaron Lynch described seven general patterns of what he called thought contagion. Quantity of parenthood covers ideas that influence how many children a person has. Efficiency of parenthood covers ideas that raise the share of children who adopt their parents' views, and cultural separatism is his example, since it walls off competing ideas.

  Proselytic ideas are passed beyond one's own children, as many religious and political movements do. Preservational ideas encourage their holders to keep them for a long time. Adversative ideas push their holders to attack competing ideas or the people who hold them.

  The last two patterns are weaker. Cognitive transmission applies to ideas that most people find cogent, and these spread passively and do not count as self-replicating. Motivational transmission applies to ideas adopted out of perceived self-interest, which Lynch said do not strictly self-propagate.

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• 5. How Big Is a Meme

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  The first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony form a meme that many people have replicated on its own. Yet Susan Blackmore points out that the entire symphony can just as well be counted as one meme. This is the unit problem: a meme has no given size.

  John S. Wilkins defined the meme as the least unit of sociocultural information whose selection bias outweighs its own tendency to change. A meme could be a single word, or the whole speech in which the word first appeared. Calling it a unit does not mean ideas are indivisible atoms.

  Blackmore answers critics by pointing to genes. A gene has no particular size either, and not every trait can be traced to a single gene. Still, it captures a key unit of inheritance under selection. Evolution selects for the gene for eye color, she notes, and not for any individual nucleotide.

  In 1981, Charles J. Lumsden and E. O. Wilson published Genes, Mind, and Culture, arguing that genes and culture co-evolve. They coined their own word, culturgen, which did not catch on. Wilson later named meme the best label for the basic unit of cultural inheritance, in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

  Other scholars reject the unit entirely. The anthropologist Dan Sperber argues that no two instances of a cultural idea are exactly the same, so each is only a material mimicry of an idea. Kalevi Kull and other semiotic theorists see the meme as a degenerate sign. It keeps the ability to be copied but lacks the interpreting actor in Charles Sanders Peirce's triad of sign, object and interpretant. Sara Cannizzaro later called memes sign systems instead of units.

  Limor Shifman, a scholar of Internet memetics, argues that earlier researchers confused memes with virals. Virals are single objects, such as a video or a picture, that spread at a particular rate. Her point is that Dawkins's original notion is closer to what media studies call digitally viral replication.

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• 6. The Critics

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  Dawkins himself took an ambiguous position on how literal his idea should be. He welcomed N. K. Humphrey's suggestion that "memes should be considered as living structures, not just metaphorically". He proposed to regard memes as "physically residing in the brain". He also endorsed Susan Blackmore's 1999 project to build a scientific theory of memes, with predictions and empirical support, even though he said his original intentions had been simpler.

  A field called memetics arose in the 1990s to study memes with an evolutionary model. Its critics argue that it ignores advances in sociology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology and social psychology. Some ask whether it is a disprovable scientific theory at all. Proponents call it a protoscience, and some detractors call it a pseudoscience.

  Luis Benitez-Bribiesca targets the gap in the gene analogy. Memes have no code script comparable to DNA, and a thought moving between brains would mutate so readily that the process would turn chaotic. In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel C. Dennett replied that the redundancy of meme expression languages supplies self-regulating correction. He noted that spiritual narratives, music and dance can survive in full detail across many generations in oral cultures.

  Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths observed that gene evolution needs selection pressures balanced against mutation rates. They saw no reason to expect the same balance for memes. The evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr called the meme an "unnecessary synonym" for a concept, since concepts also persist for long periods and can evolve.

  Scott Atran offered experimental evidence from the opposite direction. He asked religious people to write down the meanings of the Ten Commandments, and he expected consensus. Interpretations varied widely instead. Ideas, on this view, are rebuilt through inference in each mind, not copied faithfully.

  In another experiment, Atran had people with and without autism interpret sayings such as "Let a thousand flowers bloom". The group with autism tended to paraphrase closely, producing lines like "Don't cut flowers before they bloom". Controls inferred broader meanings such as "Go with the flow". Only the participants with autism came close to functioning as "meme machines".

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• 7. Belief, Ideology and Architecture

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  Dawkins turned his idea on religion, which he said biologists had tried to explain by finding biological advantages. Tribal religion, for example, had been seen as a way of solidifying group identity among cooperative pack hunters. He called for a re-analysis in terms of self-replicating ideas that spread whether or not they help anyone reproduce.

  In The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore treats religions as especially tenacious memes. A religion that values faith over evidence protects itself against the tools people normally use to judge ideas. Linking altruism to religious membership speeds its spread. Revered texts extend its life.

  Aaron Lynch, in Thought Contagion, credited the robustness of religious memes to their use of several transmission modes at once. They pass from parent to child, and they also pass sideways through proselytism. Lynch singled out Christianity as especially powerful in scope. He saw belief in the Crucifixion as amplifying the rest, because believers feel indebted to their Savior, and the cross recurs in homes and churches.

  John D. Gottsch examined how religious memeplexes mutate and are selected. He suggested that rules restricting certain sexual practices may have boosted vertical transmission. Such rules, shared by most religious memeplexes, hardened into an "inviolable canon" and eventually into secular law.

  Jack Balkin carried the approach into politics in Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology. He argued that the same mental structures that generate ideas about free speech or free markets also generate racist beliefs. In his account, harm depends on environment, and he called racist beliefs "fantasy" memes that become unjust ideologies when diverse peoples meet through trade or competition.

  Nikos Salingaros applied the idea to buildings in A Theory of Architecture. He described architectural memes as greatly simplified versions of patterns, and he said images of buildings that could not serve everyday use lodge in memory and get reproduced unconsciously. He listed memes circulating since the 1920s that he thought left contemporary architecture detached from human needs, and he compared them to antipatterns in software design.

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• 8. Memes Online

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  In 2013, Dawkins drew a line between his original idea and what happens online. An Internet meme, he said, is deliberately altered by human creativity. His version involved mutation by random change and a form of Darwinian selection. Internet memes travel through social networks, blogs, direct email and news sources, and sending one as a sign of affection is called pebbling.

  Limor Shifman uses the Psy music video "Gangnam Style", which went viral in 2012, as her example of the pattern. The video mixed with other events of the moment, especially the 2012 United States presidential election. The result was "Mitt Romney Style", a parody aimed at the Republican candidate Mitt Romney.

  A stranger offshoot appeared in 2021 with meme stocks. These are listed companies praised for the social media buzz they attract rather than for operating performance. The subreddit r/wallstreetbets and the financial services company Robinhood Markets became notable that year for helping popularize them. The best-known case is GameStop, whose share price surged after a Reddit-led idea to invest.

  Political campaigns in the United States have used Internet memes in the last three election cycles, and contestants have complained about disinformation spread through them. Chagas and colleagues studied Brazil's 2014 presidential election. They argued that memes are more than silly jokes. Humor makes some political content easier to understand, and memes help people find others who share their political ideals. Some politicians embrace the jokes aimed at them, and others respond badly to the criticism.

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