Word: memes
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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...
Richard Dawkins is Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His latest book is Unweaving the Rainbow (Houghton Mifflin). This essay was adapted from his introduction to Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (Oxford University Press...
...Dawkins' memes have proved nearly as controversial as Darwin's ideas about natural selection once were. Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (Oxford University Press), which goes so far as to suggest that we are our memes, is sure to escalate the war of words that periodically rages on the pages of the New York Review of Books and the Boston Review...
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...