Elmo Recio
Cognitive Psychology
July 17, 1998
Exploration of Memetics and Memes
Meme’s are everywhere. They are infiltrating us in every form of the way, through all five of our senses. Memetics is the study of these memes infectng their way into our brains. This ‘meme’ is not a virus or anything of the sort. However, how it behaves and carries on would make it quite analogous to the virus. Strictly defined a meme is a unit of information residing in the brain. Loosely defined it is a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. Hence, memetics, is the study of the transmission of these units of information. These memes invade their hosts and replicate from one host to the other.
There have been many arm-chair theories developed to explain memes and their transmission from host to host. However, very little empirical data has been offered up to calculate and experiment the spread of memes throughout societies. This indeed is the problem that many memeticists face today. One can quickly make the meme analogous to the virus, both biologically and electronically (via the computer,) but few have been able to formulate actual empirical data to support this arm-chair theorizing. Of these few individuals that have provided empirical data is one Aaron Lynch. His article, “Units, Events, and Dynamics in Memetic Evolution” published in the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission (Vol. 2, Issue 1, June 1998: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/vol2/index.html#issue1), places forth one of the first available documents on the study of empirical data for memes and its spread.
Previous research on the subject has been quite limited. In fact, Lynch states that common occurrences like “organic evolution, biological contagions, plasmids, and computer viruses have served as metaphors for the spread of ideas” but that this ought to have been approached the other way round. Lynch states that the above needed not to true in order to be able to define and show how an idea is replicated and distributed. This research into the subject is to cast a new light and solidify the core concepts of the theory of memetics in a way that it would be able to stand on its own, without previous knowledge of biology, or computers.
Lynch begins his explanation into Memes (Mnemons) and the spread of mnemons through several stages. First he declares a systematic way of mnemon representation. He begins with declaring a host with the mnemon-host and non-mnemon host. A is a host infected with the A mnemon and ~A is a host without the A mnemon (or the former’s complement symbol). He continues to define separate situations and combinations for mnemon replication. He begins with the combination of A + ~A -> 2A (an a-mnemon person replicates its mnemon with a non-a-mnemon person giving two people with the a-mnemon). He also pulls in multiple mnemons and implements them in the following way: A*~B + ~A*B -> A*~B + A*B. This may in turn cause the A*B host to consider and come to self realization of a third mnemon due to its combination of its infection of A*B. In which case it would be seen as A*B*~C -> A*B*C. Quite an efficient method of representing mnemons, isn’t it?
Using the above system that Lynch defined, he continued to delve further into the meme and it’s concise definition. Purely defined, and in general terms (as I understood it,) a meme is a piece of information that is stored in the mind (he uses the term, neurally stored information) that got there only by it being put there by someone else, who again had this idea in their head. This limits the concept of the meme to a purely abstract object or idea, versus a zipper, for example. However, he quickly goes on to state, that an object may be a media through which it can communicate a way to make more copies of that same object. Lynch then touches on size for a bit stating that a mnemon cannot have a size per se. One can state that A*B > A and A*B > B, however, one cannot say that A > B and B < A.
Lynch then continues to develop different forms of mnemon propagation. First is Massively Cooperative Propagation and the second is Centralized Communication. In Massively Cooperative Propagation one gets the information from different people around them. For example, if a mother of a tribe has a baby and this baby does not have the tribe’s religion implanted, all the members of that tribe will implant the religion onto the individual. The second case would be the proliferation of a mnemon via mass media, television for example.
Lynch continues, touching on levels of scientific abstraction and its fundamental role in science. He lists as an example the scientists’ uses of the word “water molecule” to be an abstraction for the actual H2O regardless of electrons and their orbital levels or energy that they have or don't have. He basically states that study of memetics “can proceed without the assumption in where there must be only one abstraction system universally right for memetics.”
The culmination of this journal’s article comes during this next section. Population Memetics is where the actual calculations on memetics takes form. He begins by stating that these calculations are not at all representational of every possible case of mnemon transference. But quickly states, that even in chemistry the rare cases of chemical reactions and formations of unexpected molecules may be rare enough to warrant dismissal. In his formulas he covers common memetic events. Such events include but are not limited to: parent to child transmission, non-offspring conversion, spontaneous dropout, and mortality. He accounts for most modeling schema pertaining to meme propagation. However, he also notes that his formulas do not accurately portray the competitive meme as their propagation may occur in a wide variety of ways (i.e. just to name two: censorship or mass extermination of the competitive mnemon via the eradication of it’s host- racial lynchings of the KKK or Nazi Germany.)
In Lynch’s last two sections he addresses the issues of falsification of data via these computer simulations and formulas and some additional empirical data collection issues involved. As far as the falsification of data is concerned he states that this may be done by not letting the simulation run long enough and or by selecting improper amounts of data for the simulation. As far as the additional empirical issues concerned, Lynch mentioned the problems with collecting data for studies. He noted that there is no way to tell of someone truly has a particular belief or if someone is just “faking it”. There is no mental probe to allow us to see what a person is thinking. The only way for us to find out such information is to retrieve the data via standard means of limited observational experiments and/or questionnaires to tabulate and weigh the data available.
In Lynch’s conclusions, he states that scientists agree that ideas influences behaviors. He also states that it is visible that when ideas cause “communication behaviors” that cause the introduction of this idea in another person there is an “autocatalysis or replication.” This is the whole implication that memeticists are trying to discover. As he put it “The theory of evolution by natural selection of memes is thus a solid and broadly unifying theory whose time has come.”