I have been writing up some wild notes while reading Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine, but since I want to keep the tone here away from the aggressively academic, I’m going to set them aside and spare you a super-long, super-convoluted braindump. (but no promises I won’t get heady in spite of myself.)

Blackmore takes on two main tasks in her book: proving that memes “exist,” and convincing us that we should care. I think she does the former quite efficiently, but the latter is addressed in a sort of anemic way. Personally, just the fact that memes plausibly exist is enough reason for me to care. You’ll see what I mean in a minute.

Worst cover ever?

Memetic evolution is proven basically by analogy with genetic evolution. Richard Dawkins outlines three features of a system that cause evolution to occur: variation, selection and retention. The idea, in a nutshell, is that if you have different things, not all of these things survive, and the ones that do survive pass on their traits to a subsequent generation, then evolution must occur. Think of a box full of barnyard animals. If you start with chickens and cows, that is variation. If all the chickens die from some chicken disease, that is selection. The cows then only have baby cows that retain the cow-ness of their parents. Starting with chickens and cows, ending with just cows, that is evolution, survival of the fittest, yadda yadda yadda.

The idea goes that if you can prove that something has these three traits (variation, selection, retention), then it can evolve. There are some finer points in here about the mechanisms involved, but for the sake of not getting too complicated, I’ll leave those aside. Memes, then, are ideas. Of course, it is rather difficult to specify what an idea is, physically, or whatever, but if we hold tight to the three traits of evolutionary replicators, it doesn’t really matter. Memes have variation (I like apples; you like oranges), they have selection (I now like oranges because you convinced me), and they have retention (I now tell all my friends to eat oranges because the cool kids do it). The generations are less clearly defined than in the box of cows, but it is the horizontal transmission of memes (as opposed to the vertical transmission of genes in a family tree) that makes them so cool.

Once Blackmore establishes this, she tries to show how Memetics can compellingly explain a host of scientific mysteries more coherently than existing theories, so that you will ditch your passé sociobiology for memes. Said mysteries include the increase in human brain size from the apes (memes thrive on bigger brains, bigger-brained monkeys survive socially, make babies, etc.), UFO sightings (ET is a meme), and the development of language itself (once we started to imitate each other, we finally had retention, and the ensuing evolution inexorably pooped out language). A lot of these explanations come across as pretty weak, especially the brain size argument, which is based on the oft-disproven hypothesis that brain size has much to do with intelligence.

I find the linguistic explanation pretty compelling or at the very least, interesting. The founding premise is that any development that aids the replication of memes will be selected for; so grammar and language, which make memes easier to copy and transmit, were successful because those who initially used them were better able to communicate and, thus, survive. Once everyone has evolved language, memes essentially evolve on their own, without any necessary ties to biological fitness. Divorced from biological survival, memes evolve like crazy, spawning modern human culture. Awesome.

The idea that the survival of cultural features is dependent on how good they are to the memes is played out online: see Facebook, connecting meme machines for instant and widespread meme replication. Hypothetically, you could use a criterion like this to predict the success or failure of an internet startup: Is it good for the memes?

More immediately, however, in regards to this very blog: it should not survive unless it is good for meme propagation. So, starting with that previous post on Mavis Beacon, I’m starting a new post category specifically for links and content found elsewhere on the internet: Memes. From now on, there should be a mix of original and linked content, probably 50/50, but who knows.

If you’re displeased with this development, just remember: What’s good for the memes is good for you.