What Is a Meme?

THE STUDY OF MEMES (a new field called "memetics") is going to revolutionize psychology, cultural anthropology, political science and religious studies. In fact it has already started. Memetics will have as large an impact on those fields as the discovery of the gene had on biology.

The word "meme" was coined by the British zoologist, Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene which came out in 1976. Dawkins' book was a presentation of a new way of looking at genes. Up until then, the conventional way of understanding genes was from the organism's point of view. In other words, genes are selected that help the organism survive.

But there was a problem with that way of thinking about genes. Several facts did not seem to fit (for example, some genes function more like parasites and don't contribute to an organism's success).

But, Dawkins said, when you look at the facts from the individual gene's point of view, all those facts fit.

He went further to say that whenever you have something that can make copies of itself, like DNA, you will have evolution because some copies will survive better or reproduce faster, and those will eventually outcompete the other kinds.

And in his last chapter, he said genes aren't the only things in this universe that make copies of themselves. There is one other thing that we know of, but there isn't a word for it, so Dawkins invented one: meme. A meme is anything that can be copied from one mind to another.

A song is a meme. A saying is a meme. An idea is a meme. The custom of shaking hands is a meme. The word "meme" is itself a meme and it has now been copied from my mind to yours. Remember that definition: A meme is anything that can be copied from one mind to another.

Dawkins further said that because memes make copies of themselves, they will evolve. Some memes will copy faster than others. Some will be more "contagious" than others. And if they are not all copied perfectly, any given variation has the potential to be more contagious than the original, in which case it will survive better or be copied more often, so that meme may eventually dominate.

So for example, if you have a religion and it's going along just fine and somewhere along the way, someone adds the idea that if you can convert others to your religion, you gain some reward, you now have a new variation, a mutation. Now you have two versions of the same religion.

Let's say one branch keeps the religion to themselves. In the other branch, however, many of the followers are out actively trying to recruit new converts. Give those two branches a couple hundred years, and guess which one will have more converts?

It doesn't matter whether it is right or wrong. It doesn't matter if it is good for the organism or the group. It is blind, just as the natural selection of genes is blind. If a variation allows a gene or a meme to make more copies, it makes more copies.

This is a very interesting subject, and since Dawkins' book came out, several other books have been written on the subject. The best one is The Meme Machine. The one with the best examples is Thought Contagion. Read a review of Thought Contagion here.


does meme stand for culture?

Yes, a meme could be seen as a unit of culture. What the concept of meme adds is the idea of evolution, of competition between variations of a meme, and the idea that it is possible to look at a meme from the meme's perspective rather than from the organism's perspective. In other words, memes are making copies of themselves, using our brains and biology to do it, and what will succeed may have nothing to do with what helps the organism or even the group (and may even be harmful to the organism or group).

If you have a tune in your head you can't get rid of, what is going on? A successful is meme using your brain against your will to generate copies of itself. In this case, you might not be making a sound, so all it is doing is going around in your head, but as soon as you whistle it or hum it or play the song where others can hear it, the meme is using you to put copies of itself into the brains of others. You may not even like the fact that you can't get rid of the song. It doesn't matter what you like. It doesn't matter if it helps you or harms you. The meme is successful.

Memetics is a new theory. A new theory often doesn't add any new facts, but explains the facts with more power, or more completely, or explains previously unexplainable facts, and usually a new theory opens avenues of exploration that weren't available within previous theories. A good new theory also makes testable predictions possible that weren't possible before.

One of the ways I think memetics will impact psychology is...hell, I think it will completely change psychology. Think about what the field of biology was before the theory of evolution. Hardly recognizable. Yes, they studied life forms. But now the foundation of biology rests on the solid footing of Darwinism. Everything biological is based on it. I think that will happen to psychology with the theory of memetics.

What is the role, for example, of early learning? How is it influenced? Is the brain pre-wired to make copies of memes? Are there biological predispositions toward learning some kinds of memes but not others? Can learning curriculums be designed to use this meme-copying machinery better than previous curriculums? Perhaps most importantly, how will the meme theory improve our ability to deal with religious fanaticism?

People have "learned" a lot of things that aren't true, and may even be harmful. Is it possible to have something like gene therapy (where they infect you with a virus that corrects your own DNA), called meme-therapy, where they can correct important faulty or dysfunctional memes by infecting you with a meme virus?

It's a new science. It'll be interesting to see it mature.

The "memosphere" will have a huge impact on the war on terrorism, for good or evil. As a matter of fact, this war exists because of a particular "memeplex" (a group of memes that have joined together for greater survival, somewhat like a multicellular organism is a grouping of single cells). Learn how you can participate in winning on the most important front: The War Of Memes.

Read more: Thought Contagion

Read even more: The Terrifying Brilliance Of The Islamic Memeplex