Chandler, Daniel & Rod Munday. 2011. A dictionary of communication. Oxford: Oxford Reference. 10.1093/acref/9780199568758.001.0001 Search in Google Scholar We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory,' or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'. Heylighen, Francis. "Meme replication: The memetic life-cycle". Principia Cybernetica. Archived from the original on 4 October 2018 . Retrieved 26 July 2013. The term meme is a shortening (modeled on gene) of mimeme, which comes from Ancient Greek mīmēma ( μίμημα; pronounced [míːmɛːma]), meaning 'imitated thing', itself from mimeisthai ( μιμεῖσθαι, 'to imitate'), from mimos ( μῖμος, 'mime'). [17] [18] [19]

The word was coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. [14] [20] Examples of memes given in Dawkins' book include melodies, catchphrases, fashion, and the technology of building arches. [21] A person is called selfish, not for pursuing his or her own good, but for neglecting his or her neighbor’s.” – Richard Whatly Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.” – Oscar Wilde Efficiency of parenthood: an idea that increases the proportion of children who will adopt ideas of their parents. Cultural separatism exemplifies one practice in which one can expect a higher rate of meme-replication—because the meme for separation creates a barrier from exposure to competing ideas.At first blush, the notion that the self-disclosure impulse is somehow good for the species might seem counterintuitive. If all we did was prattle on about ourselves, we’d soon bore one another to extinction. Why would we have evolved to get a rush of pleasure from hearing ourselves talk? Dawkins, Richard (2015). "Memes". Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science. London: Bantam Press / Transworld Publishers. pp.404–408. ISBN 9780593072561. Biological evolution is a change in the statistical distribution of biological (phenotypic or genetic) traits within a population (or a set of populations). Whether and how this statistical distribution changes can be explained in terms of two sets of factors (and of the interactions between them): transmission factors and selection factors. Let us consider them in turn. Organisms are causally connected with their descendants by means of what are sometimes called "inheritance channels". These channels are transmission factors. Genetic transmission is the most important of these channels but -- as I have argued elsewhere (Mameli 2004) -- it is not the only one. These causal connections between the generations are responsible for the extent to which (and for the way in which) organisms resemble their offspring. Thereby, such causal connections affect the extent to which (and the way in which) the statistical distribution of a trait in a given generation depends on the statistical distribution of that trait (or some related traits) in the previous generation. Explanations of changes in the distribution of traits that appeal to selection factors, in contrast, refer not to the features of inheritance channels but to the way biological traits affect the chances that organisms have of surviving and reproducing. Selection occurs when a trait increases in frequency because it makes the organisms that possess it more likely to do things that result -- through reproduction -- in the existence of other organisms with the same trait. As Bill Wimsatt has pointed out, the distinction between transmission factors and selection factors is in some cases blurred (Wimsatt 1999), but in general it provides a theoretically fruitful way of analysing biological change. According to the author, the solution is to be found in the theory of mental content: mental content is cultural DNA. On her view, while the best way of identifying genes is in terms of DNA sequences, the best way of identifying memes is in terms of mental contents. As a consequence, the theory of mental content can advance our understanding of cultural evolution in the same way that the theory of DNA has advanced our understanding of genetic evolution. Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.

For instance, the possibility that ideas were subject to the same pressures of evolution as were biological attributes was discussed in the time of Charles Darwin. T. H. Huxley (1880) claimed that "The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals." [25] Some of the models show that cultural evolution of a Darwinian kind can occur even when cultural variants are not faithfully copied discrete particles (Boyd and Richerson 2005). That is, pace Dawkins, cultural evolution of a Darwinian kind can occur even when, strictly speaking, there are no memes at all. But -- one may wonder -- how is it possible to see culture as an evolutionary system once we give up the assumption that it is made up of particulate gene-like entities? This is obviously an important question. Let me outline the answer.Deacon, Terrence. "The trouble with memes (and what to do about it)". The Semiotic Review of Books. 10: 3. Heylighen, Francis; Chielens, K. (2009). Meyers, B. (ed.). Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science: Evolution of Culture, Memetics (PDF). Bibcode: 2009ecss.book.....M. doi: 10.1007/978-0-387-30440-3. ISBN 9780387758886. Archived (PDF) from the original on 24 February 2021 . Retrieved 22 May 2009. Cloak, F. T. 1975. "Is a cultural ethology possible?" Human Ecology 3: 161–182. doi: 10.1007/BF01531639. Yet in The Descent of Man (1871) Darwin does not use the word “metaphor”. He discusses parallels, homologies, and analogies, writing that, “The survival and preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.

As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.” – Helen Keller Stang, Nicholas F. 2018. Kant’s transcendental idealism. In Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism (accessed 21 March 2019). Search in Google ScholarThey may be self-centered, insensitive, and unwilling to compromise, which can lead to conflicts and problems in interpersonal relationships. Stein, Stephen 1992. The Shaker experience in America: A history of the United Society of Believers. New Haven: Yale University Press. Search in Google Scholar