The evolution of the meme | Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science (2024)

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What is the memetic approach to cultural evolution? ›

Memetics is a theory of cultural evolution based on the idea that behaviors, skills, habits, stories, and technologies that are copied from person to person in culture act as a second replicator.

Proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution. Memes do this through processes analogous to those of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, each of which influences a meme's reproductive success.

Memetics is the study of memes, be they phrases, behaviors, or any idea that is transferred from person to person. What is typically thought of as a "meme" today is an internet meme.

Dawkins conceived of memes as the cultural parallel to biological genes and considered them, in a manner similar to “selfish” genes, as being in control of their own reproduction and thus serving their own ends.

Cultural evolutionists hold that, in some sense, culture evolves. There are plenty of ways of understanding what is involved in evolution, and so there are plenty of ways of taking an evolutionary approach to culture. This chapter fashions a serviceable taxonomy of these varied approaches.

According to this approach, cultures are not conspiracies concocted by some people in order to take advantage of others (as Marxists tend to think). Rather, cultures are mental parasites that emerge accidentally, and thereafter take advantage of all people infected by them. This approach is sometimes called memetics.

Like genes, memes would be replicators, and the mechanism by which they produced copies of themselves would be imitation: Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or arches.

Namely, there are a few key points on which most criticisms focus: mentalism, cultural determinism, Darwinian reduction, a lack of academic novelty, and a lack of empirical evidence of memetic mechanisms.

Coined by the British evolutionist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene (1976), a meme is a unit of culture—such as “tunes, ideas, catch‐phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches.” In humans, memes have supposedly taken over much of the evolutionary burden of the traditional units of ...

Characteristics of memes include their susceptibility to parody, their use of intertextuality, their propagation in a viral pattern, and their evolution over time.

What is memetic technology? ›

Memetic engineering, also meme engineering, is a term developed by Leveious Rolando, John Sokol, and Gibron Burchett based on Richard Dawkins' theory of memes. The process of developing memes, through meme-splicing and memetic synthesis, with the intent of altering the behavior of others in society or humanity.

The most popular memes often feature a recognizable image or video clip that is paired with a witty caption or phrase. For example, the "Distracted Boyfriend" meme features an image of a man looking at another woman while his girlfriend looks on in disapproval.

The word “meme” comes from the Greek mimema, meaning something that has been “imitated.” According to Britannica, the word was first introduced by Richard Dawkins, a British biologist, in his book The Selfish Gene; his intention was for “meme” to sound similar to "gene.” In his book, Dawkins makes a direct connection ...

“Memes” are the units of selection in culture as genes are the units of selection in evolution. When we talk of traits (height, hairiness, colour-blindness, and so on) being passed down through generations, we are also talking about genes being passed down.

Biological evolution cannot be separated from cultural evolution. Cultural trends, population demographics and the differing use of technologies in human cultural groups will all play a role in the continuing evolution of the human species.

Theories of Cultural Evolution: Human Stages, Historical Materialism & Neo-Malthusian. Jessica has taught junior high history and college seminar courses.

The new algorithm includes a matching phase to align different clustering solutions. The algorithm uses K-means as a local optimization routine. The numerical performance is excellent both in terms of quality and of computational requirements, when compared to state of the art.

The typological system used by Morgan and Tylor broke cultures down into three basic evolutionary stages: savagery, barbarism and civilization.

unilinear social evolution – the notion that culture generally develops (or evolves) in a uniform and progressive manner. It was thought that most societies pass through the same series of stages, to arrive ultimately at a common end.