Memes

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Memes are ideas that spread.

The term meme was first used by RICHARD DAWKINS in his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene". (Updated and extended in 1989, leaving the original text intact, BUY THIS BOOK, you will not regret it. Published by Oxford University Press.)

Memes are ideas that spread through human cultures and across the generations. The word was invented to suggest a strong analogy with genes. I hope the great man will allow me the liberty of quoting his work at length:-

"I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.

The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream.'

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms and eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain."

A meme does not try to be propagated. Neither does a gene. Looking back with hindsight we can see that certain patterns within the meme or the compatibility or otherwise of that meme to the surrounding culture has an impact on the survival of the meme. A meme is just an idea, it has no goals or intentions. A gene is just a chemical, it has no plan to take over the world. That which has what it takes to be replicated will be replicated.

Memes are like viruses of the mind. As they change from host to host they change their physical make-up without losing their defining pattern. Just like a biological virus. When I get “my wife's cold” I am suffering from a virus that is separated by several generations from that which my wife has, it has no molecules in common, just the patterns of arrangement. The virus particles still in my wife neither know nor care that copies of them are now in my body, and being spread to more potential hosts. Likewise there is no payoff to an idea that gets spread, the idea has no real physical existence. A wave has no real existence, it is not any one group of molecules, it is a gross pattern of behaviour of a fluid, but it is a pattern of behaviour that can please the eye, thrill the surf-rider or flood a city. To say that a wave does not exist is not rational, a meme is just as real. You cannot point to it but you recognize it when you see it.

The truth of a meme is irrelevant to the success of the meme. The classic example is the urban folk tale.

The “poodle in the microwave” story has been passed around for many years because it is a good meme, it is a little bit shocking, a bit revolting, very fascinating and borderline believable. In case you have lived on Mars since the 1970's I will recap the story. Old lady / scatterbrained woman / blonde has a poodle / other small dog / cat which gets wet in the rain / is washed. To dry off the animal the woman (that part is universal) thinks that drying the animal quickly is called for and so into the microwave goes Fluffy / Fifi etc. Often it is claimed that the story is true, the woman is always a friend of a friend or similarly unnamed person. That meme has been going on since the first microwaves came out, I heard it as a boy. But that is a young meme compared to the belief in the afterlife meme or the son of God meme.

Very little of what appears in the Bible is memetically novel. Noah's flood seems to be a hearsay account of a tribal memory of a catastrophic flood beyond any normal tsunami or deluge. There is a novel theory that it began with the opening of the Bosporus, allowing the waters of the Mediterranean to enter and flood what is now the Black Sea, an area of fertile land surrounding a much lower level large freshwater lake. An event like that is going to be talked about for thousands of years! Whether or not that is true there is a lot of evidence that flood stories abound in the Middle East which predate the Bible account by centuries. The son of God meme naturally has a pre-Christian, non-Jewish origin. Alexander the Great was the first man who encouraged his followers to proclaim his status as the son of a god.

The virgin birth meme began with a biblical mistranslation. The word for 'unmarried woman' was translated as 'virgin'. Whether or not that was a mistake or a calculated deception it certainly had an effect or two on the world. The faith meme is a classic. This meme helps reinforce any other meme it is associated with. It acts just like the AIDS virus, attacking the immune system. By neutralizing logic and reason the faith meme will allow the other memes it is associated with to take a firm hold on the minds of its host. Christianity is a very advanced form of adaptive multi-stranded meme complex. Like many biological viruses it has smaller units within it that soften up the target, spread the "payload" rapidly and at the same time react with ruthless efficiency against any of the brain's immune responses.

None of this should be seen as conspiracy theory, I hardly ever subscribe to them. That which survives and prospers is that which happened to have the necessary qualities. If Christianity was not good at making conversions, absorbing heresies and older beliefs and resisting de-conversion then it would not be as widespread as it is. The College of Cardinals does not sit about planning ways to make their religion more potent or palatable, they believe in it themselves. Misguided fools.

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