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Essay / The concept of the modern "meme" from one person to another within a culture. -often with the aim of conveying a particular phenomenon, theme or meaning represented by the “meme”. A "meme" acts as a unit carrying ideas, symbols or cultural practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena with an imitated theme. Proponents of the concept view “memes” as cultural analogues of genes in the sense that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. Proponents theorize that "memes" are a viral phenomenon that can evolve through natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution. Memes achieve this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, each of which influences the reproductive success of a meme. “Memes” spread through the behavior they generate in their hosts. Memes that spread less prolifically may disappear, while others may survive, spread, and mutate. Memes that replicate most effectively are more successful, and some can replicate effectively even when they prove detrimental to the well-being of their hosts. A field of study called memetics emerged in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Critics on various fronts have questioned the idea that academic studies can examine memes empirically. However, advances in neuroimaging could make empirical studies possible. Some social science commentators question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units, and are particularly critical of the biological nature of this theory's foundations. Others have argued that this use of the term is the result of a misunderstanding of the original proposition. The word "meme" is a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins. It comes from Dawkins' 1976 book "The Selfish Gene." Dawkins' position is somewhat ambiguous: he welcomed NK Humphrey's suggestion that "memes" should be seen as living structures, not just metaphorically, and proposed viewing memes as "physically residing in the brain ". He later argued that his original intentions, presumably before his endorsement of Humphrey's opinion, had been simpler. At the 2013 New Visitors' Showcase in Cannes, Dawkins' opinion on memetics was deliberately ambiguous.EtymologyThe word meme is a shorthand for mime coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene." " as a concept to discuss evolutionary principles to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, slogans, fashion, and arch-building technology. Kenneth Pike invented the associated terms emic and etic, generalizing the linguistic idea of phoneme, morpheme, grapheme, lexeme and tagmeme, characterizing them as an internal view and an external view of behavior and extending the concept into a tagmemic theory of behaviorhumanOriginsThe word "meme" has its origins in Richard Dawkins' 1976 book "The Selfish Gene." Dawkins cites as inspiration the work of geneticist LL Cavalli-Sforza, anthropologist FT Cloak, and ethologist JM Cullen. Dawkins wrote that evolution did not depend on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a self-replicating unit of inheritance – in the case of biological evolution, the gene. For Dawkins, the meme illustrates another self-reproducing unit with potential importance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution. Although Dawkins coined the term "meme" and developed meme theory, the possibility that ideas are subject to the same evolutionary pressures as biological attributes was discussed during Darwin's time. TH Huxley asserted that “the struggle for existence is as valid in the intellectual world as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thought, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power to resist extinction by its rivals. » Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator. He hypothesized that many cultural entities could be considered replicators and cited melodies, fashions, and acquired skills as examples. “Memes” typically reproduce through exposure to humans, who have evolved to become efficient copiers of information and behavior. Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they can refine, combine, or modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time. Dawkins compared the process by which memes survive and change during the evolution of culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution. On the other hand, the concept of genetics acquired concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. The transmission of “memes” requires a physical medium, such as photons, sound waves, touch, taste or smell, because “memes” can only be transmitted through the senses. Dawkins noted that in a cultural society, a person does not need to have descendants to retain influence over the actions of individuals thousands of years after their death. But if you contribute to global culture, if you have a good idea... it can live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved into the common pool. Socrates may or may not have one or two genes alive in today's world, as GC Williams has pointed out, but who cares? The “meme” complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong. Although Dawkins coined the term meme, he did not claim that the idea was entirely new, and there have been other expressions for similar ideas in the past. In 1904, Richard Semon published “Die Meme”. The term "meme" is also used in Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the White Ant, with some parallels to Dawkins' concept. The reuse of the neural space hosting the copy of a certain “meme” to host different memes is the greatest threat to the copy of that “meme”. A “meme” that increases the longevity of its hosts will generally survive longer. On the contrary, a meme that shortens the longevity of its hosts will tend to disappear more quickly. However, because the hosts are mortal, retention is not enough to perpetuate a meme in the long term; Memes also need transmission. Life forms can transmit information both vertically and horizontally. “Memes” can replicate vertically or horizontally within a singlebiological generation. They can also remain dormant for long periods of time. “Memes” reproduce by copying from one nervous system to another, either by communication or by imitation. Imitation often involves copying an observed behavior of another individual. Communication can be direct or indirect, where "memes" are transmitted from one individual to another via a copy recorded in an inanimate source, such as a book or musical score. Adam McNamara has suggested that memes can thus be classified as internal or external. “Memes” Social contagions such as fads, hysteria, copycat crime and copycat suicide illustrate “memes” considered the contagious imitation of ideas. Observers distinguish the contagious imitation of “memes” from instinctively contagious phenomena such as yawning and laughter, which they consider innate behaviors. Aaron Lynch described seven general patterns of transmission of "memes", or "thought contagion": - Amount of parenting: an idea that influences the number of children one has. Children respond particularly receptively to their parents' ideas, and so ideas that directly or indirectly encourage a higher birth rate will reproduce at a higher rate than others. Those that discourage higher birth rates. - Effectiveness of parenting: an idea that increases the proportion of children who will adopt their parents' ideas. Cultural separatism illustrates a practice in which a higher rate of "meme" replication can be expected, because the separation "meme" creates a barrier against exposure to competing ideas. - Proselytic: ideas generally transmitted to others beyond one's own children. Ideas that encourage the proselytization of a "meme", as seen in many religious or political movements, can reproduce "memes" horizontally across a given generation, spreading more quickly than transmissions of "memes" do. memes” from parent to child. ideas that influence those who hold them to continue to hold them for a long time. Ideas that encourage longevity in their hosts, or that leave their hosts particularly reluctant to abandon or replace those ideas, enhance the preservability of "memes" and provide protection against competition or proselytization from other "memes." - Adversative: ideas that influence those who hold them to attack or sabotage competing ideas and/or those who hold them. Adversarial replication can provide an advantage in the transmission of memes when the meme itself encourages aggression against other memes. - Cognitive: ideas perceived as convincing by most members of the population who encounter them. Cognitively transmitted “memes” rely heavily on a set of other ideas and cognitive traits already widespread in the population, and therefore generally spread more passively than other forms of “meme” transmission. “Memes” spread in cognitive transmission are not considered self-replicating. - Motivation: ideas that people adopt because they perceive a certain personal interest in adopting them. Strictly speaking, motivationally transmitted “memes” are not self-propagating, but this mode of transmission often occurs in association with self-replicating memes in the modes of parental effectiveness, proselytizing, and conservative. “Memes” as Discrete Units Dawkins initially defined the meme as a noun that “conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” The “meme” as a unit provides a convenient way to discuss “an element of thoughtcopied from one person to another,” whether that thought contains other thoughts or is part of a larger meme. A “meme” may consist of a single word, or a “meme” may consist of the entire speech in which that word first appeared. This is an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single unit of self-replicating information found on the self-replicating chromosome. Although identifying "memes" as "units" reflects their nature to replicate as discrete, indivisible entities, it does not imply that thoughts are quantified in any way or that there are “atomic” ideas that cannot be dissected into smaller pieces. A “meme” has no given size. Susan Blackmore writes that melodies from Beethoven's symphonies are commonly used to illustrate the difficulty of delineating memes into distinct units. She notes that although the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony form a widely reproduced "meme" as an independent unit, one can also view the entire symphony as a single "meme". Evolutionary Influences on Memes Dawkins noted the three conditions that must exist for evolution to occur: - variation, or the introduction of new changes into existing elements; - heredity or replication, or the ability to create copies of elements; - differential “fitness”, or the possibility for one element to be more or less more adapted to the environment than another. Dawkins points out that the process of evolution occurs naturally whenever these conditions coexist, and that evolution does not only apply to organic elements such as genes. He views "memes" as also having properties necessary for evolution, and therefore sees the evolution of "memes" not only as analogous to genetic evolution, but as a real phenomenon subject to the laws of natural selection. Dawkins noted that as various ideas pass from one generation to the next, they can either enhance or harm the survival of the people who obtain those ideas or influence the survival of the ideas themselves. For example, a certain culture may develop unique tool designs and manufacturing methods that give it a competitive advantage over another culture. Each tool design therefore acts somewhat similar to a biological gene in that some populations have it and others do not, and the function of the “meme” directly affects the presence of the design in future generations. Consistent with the thesis that in evolution we can view organisms simply as suitable "hosts" for replicating genes, Dawkins argues that we can view people as "hosts" for replicating memes. Therefore, a successful “meme” may or may not need to provide any benefit to its host. Susan Blackmore distinguishes the difference between the two modes of inheritance in the evolution of "memes", characterizing the Darwinian mode as "copying the instructions" and the Lamarckian as "copying the product". Theistic memes discussed include "prohibition of aberrant sexual practices such as incest, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, castration, and religious prostitution", which may have increased the vertical transmission of the parent religious meme. Similar “memes” are thus included in the majority of religious memeplexes, and harden over time; they become an “inviolable canon” or a set of dogmas, which eventually find their place in secular law. We could also speak of the propagation of a taboo.MemeticsThe discipline of memetics, which dates from the mid-1980s, offersan approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of "meme". Memeticians have proposed that just as memes function analogously to genes, memetics functions analogously to genetics. Memetics attempts to apply conventional scientific methods to explain existing patterns and the transmission of cultural ideas. Major criticisms of memetics include the claim that memetics ignores established advances in other fields of cultural studies, such as sociology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, and social psychology. Questions remain about whether or not the meme concept counts as a validly falsifiable scientific theory. This view views memetics as a theory in its infancy: a protoscience for its supporters, or a pseudoscience for some detractors. Criticism of Meme Theory One objection to studying the evolution of memes in genetic terms involves a perceived gap in the gene/meme analogy: cumulative evolution of genes depends on biological selection pressures that are neither too great nor too low compared to mutation rates. There seems no reason to think that the same balance will exist in selection pressures on "memes." Luis Benitez-Bribiesca MD, a critic of memetics, calls the theory a "pseudo-scientific dogma" and "a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of consciousness and cultural evolution". factual criticism, Benitez-Bribiesca points out the absence of a "code script" for "memes", and the excessive instability of the mechanism of mutation of "memes", which would lead to low replication precision and a rate of high mutation, making the evolutionary process chaotic. British political philosopher John Gray called Dawkins' memetic theory of religion "nonsense" and "not even a theory...the latest in a succession of Darwinian metaphors." "misguided", comparable to Intelligent Design in its value as a science. Another criticism comes from semiotic theorists such as Deacon and Kull. This view considers the concept of "meme" as a primitivized concept of "sign". meme” is thus described in memetics as a sign devoid of triadic nature. Semioticians may consider a “meme” to be a “degenerate” sign, which only includes its ability to be copied. Thus, in the broadest sense, the objects of copying are memes, while the objects of translation and interpretation are signs.Fracchia and Lewontin view memetics as reductionist and inadequate. Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr disapproved of Dawkins's genetic view and use of the term "meme", saying it was an "unnecessary synonym" for "concept", believing that concepts are not limited to an individual or a generation. for long periods of time and may evolve.ApplicationsOpinions differ as to how best to apply the concept of memes within an "appropriate" disciplinary framework. Some see memes as providing a useful philosophical perspective for examining cultural evolution. Proponents of this view argue that viewing cultural developments from the perspective of “memes” – as if “memes” themselves are responding to pressure to maximize their own replication and survival – can lead to insights useful and produce valuable predictions about how culture develops over time. Others, such as Bruce Edmonds and Robert Aunger, have focused on the need to provide an empirical basis for memetics to become a useful and respected scientific discipline. A third approach, described as.
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