Word: memes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Lately, this view, "cultural evolutionism," has been revived and given a new vocabulary. "Meme"--a word chosen to stress the parallel with "gene"--is the label for packets of cultural information: technologies, songs, beliefs and so on. Just as those genes most conducive to their own replication are the ones that prevail, those memes best at getting themselves transmitted from human to human are the ones that come to form the human environment...
Farming, which took shape in the Old World around 8,000 B.C. and in the New World a few millenniums later, is a much misunderstood meme. Anthropologists sometimes call it an "energy technology," since food does, after all, energize us; but farming may have originally mattered more as a kind of information-processing technology. By radically increasing the human population that a given acre could support, farming sped up the synergistic exchange of cultural information, lubricating innovation; it packed lots of neurons together, raising both the size and the efficiency of social brains...
...distant cities became linked through commerce (much of it orchestrated by written contract), culture acquired a kind of disaster insurance. Any valuable meme--the concept of the chariot or of coins--would spread so fast from city to city that it could survive any catastrophes that afflicted its birthplace. The world's data-processing system was getting better at making backup copies...
Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who has long battled what he calls "Darwinian fundamentalism," dismisses the meme as a "meaningless metaphor." H. Allen Orr, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Rochester, isn't much nicer. "I think memetics is an utterly silly idea," he complains. "It's just cocktail-party science...
Natural selection, Orr points out, applies beautifully to random processes such as gene mutations but would fall apart if animals could deliberately upgrade their young. Ideas, on the other hand, are often consciously modified before they're transmitted. Meme evolution, unlike gene evolution, isn't random. "When Newton invented calculus," says Orr, "he didn't do it by generating a million random ideas and choosing the best one." Darwinism, say the critics, has no relevance under these conditions...