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From: josh@cs.rutgers.edu
Newsgroups: sci.nanotech
Subject: memes
Message-ID: <Jun.10.21.24.35.1991.17960@planchet.rutgers.edu>
Date: 11 Jun 91 01:24:36 GMT
Sender: nanotech@planchet.rutgers.edu
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Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu


I've gotten a couple of requests about what a "meme" is.  I use the 
term in the sense that Richard Dawkins defined it when he introduced it 
in the book "The Selfish Gene".

Dawkins conceived of "meme" as a unit of a replicating information
pattern that corresponds to a "gene" in a self-reproducing organism.
Unfortunately, he did not introduce a word for the whole replicator
of which the meme is a building block, so there has been some tendency 
for "meme" to be used in this sense as well.  I personally try to
avoid this in the interests of precise thinking.

The whole replicating idea systems, or "meme complexes", are such
things as sciences, religions, games, legal and organizational codes, 
recipes, designs, superstitions, and so forth.  Specific memes may
or may not be included in any given complex;  some books are murder 
mysteries, some mysteries are locked-room puzzles.  One has the temptation
to identify mysteries as a memetic species, with locked-roomedness 
as a trait.  However, memetics is not well-formulated enough as yet
to make such notions more than interesting metaphors.

Designs, i.e. of buildings, machines, tools, clothing, and other 
artifacts, are probably the most distinctly expressed memetic phenotypes.
Here we can see specific memes as the designs of particular parts
or patterns.  It is worthwhile noting that the idea of evolution
in such designs was well understood before Darwin.  The mechanisms
by which it occurs, i.e. conscious choice on the part of designers,
is easier to see than natural selection.  

The thing that is new with the concept of memes is the realization
that natural selection also operates on the evolution of designs,
and of other ideas, and indeed on all information patterns propagated
from human to human.  This leads to the realization that these, too,
evolve.  

This of course leads to a lot more questions than answers;  most
of these questions remain open.  There is a lot of very interesting
work to be done.

--JoSH