When Richard Dawkins coined the word meme (back in 1976, in The Selfish Gene — a must read), I suggest he made one understandable mistake, an oversight that, as far as I can tell, has lingered ever since. It might even explain why memetics hasn't become a viable field of scientific research.
A meme is roughly an idea that makes copies of itself, which compete with copies of other memes for available resources (basically, human hosts). When a class of things self-copy and compete, they evolve; Dawkins used the general term replicators for any such things. Genes are replicators, and he used memes as a second example of replicators, showing that the concept has some generality to it. All good so far, but he also wrote that this second kind of replicator was "still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup".
Um, no. It's very easy to think that, because the world that memes inhabit —the ideosphere— isn't directly visible to our senses. Ask yourself, if the memetic equivalent of a tyrannosaurus were (metaphorically) standing right next to you, how would you know?
Memes are, I suggest, nowhere near the primeval-soup stage. For thousands of years, memetic organisms have roamed the earth, with reproduction (as opposed to replication), death of individual organisms, inactive memes, and something like differentiated organs. You are surrounded, at this moment, by memetic organisms.
What's an organism?Some large groups of memes get copied together; the name memeplex has been been suggested for such groups. Astrology, say, or algebra. But a biological organism isn't just a set of genes — it is, as Dawkins put it, a vehicle for genes. The replicators have evolved the trick of building these vehicles for themselves. Here are some things to expect of any kind of organisms.
- Each organism carries a reasonably stable set of replicators, some of which influence the organism's fitness.
- Organisms reproduce. A child is created by a process involving one or more parents, from which the child inherits many (most?) of the replicators it carries.
- Organisms die. When they do, some of the replicators they carried may be carried on by their descendants.
- Replicators with the potential to induce certain organism traits may be carried by organisms that don't exhibit those traits. (Both recessive genes and junk genes spring to mind.)
In 1994, there was much fanfare about the twenty fifth anniversary of the first moonwalk. Footage of astronauts on the moon was replayed on television. In one of these clips, an astronaut stood on the moon and did the classic experiment of dropping a light object and a heavy object to see if the heavy object fell faster. (A feather and a wrench, I think they were.) It wasn't well controlled; the point was evidently public education about science, for which it was preceded by a verbal explanation of the experiment — so it taught about scientific method as well as about universal gravitation. Great stuff.
What left my jaw hanging was that the explanation started with (iirc) "Aristotle said". Nobody was supposed to believe Aristotle's theory about falling objects, but this guy on the moon was deliberately teaching the general public about what they weren't supposed to believe. Inherited memes systematically preserved in a sort of "inactive" form.
Thomas Kuhn described some aspects of this species of memetic organisms in 1962, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (another must read). Notably, he described its reproductive process, which is what he called a scientific revolution. Here's a rough portrait of a paradigm scientific field as a memetic organism.
The meme set carried by the organism includes a mass of theories, some of which contradict each other. At the center of this mass is a nucleus of theories that are supposed to be believed (part of what Kuhn called a paradigm). Surrounding the nucleus are theories that are meant to be contrasted with the paradigm and rejected, together with memes about how to conduct the contrast; one might call this surrounding material the co-nucleus. While the organism thrives, the contrast with the co-nucleus strengthens belief in the nucleus, thus recruiting and retaining members of the organism's scientific community. When the organism falters (the scientific community loses faith in the paradigm), eventually a new paradigm emerges, forming the nucleus of a new organism, while the new co-nucleus may contain both some nuclear and some co-nuclear material from the parent(s).
During reproduction, fragments may be drawn for the new nucleus (as "inspiration") from pretty much anywhere, even from non-sciences. It seems that a thriving science may deliberately surround itself with a sort of third ring of memes, outside the co-nucleus and perhaps somewhat loosely coupled with the science itself (symbiotic?), that provide raw material for new co-nuclear or nuclear formations. This third ring may include alternative, pseudo-, and fringe science; and science fiction, which can provide a venue for scientists within the community to explore new ideas without the ridicule or ostracism that would result if they prematurely proposed the same ideas in a scientific forum.
[I am, btw, not only let down but also rather fascinated, to find my memory of the moonwalk gravity demo does not match the footage I've found on YouTube [link]; besides being a hammer rather than a wrench, this footage doesn't have the explanation, nor the name Aristotle, that waxes so prominent in my recollection. Either what I'm remembering is dominated by the epiphany I had while watching it rather than what was shown, or, not impossibly, there could be other footage floating around, either from a separate incident or (less expensively) with some sort of dubbed-over narration.]Second example
Religion seems to be a second species (or genus, or some taxon anyway) of memetic organisms. I may do even more poorly here, as I'm practically unread on comparative religion, but I'll take a stab at it anyway; hopefully, it will suffice to make the taxon plausible, even if my specific suggestions don't hold up at all.
The best fit for an organism seems to be below the scale usually called a sect, though conceivably somewhat above the scale of a congregation. Part of the carried memetic material is a large mass I'll call a religious tradition, which may be written or oral. The tradition is augmented by further memes, which I'll call an interpretation, determining what different parts of the tradition are supposed to mean. The tradition and interpretation should be able to recruit and retain followers. When changing societal environment makes those memes less effective, it becomes increasingly likely that the community will either splinter, or adjust its carried meme set, creating a new organism with perhaps some deletions or even additions to the tradition, but especially, changes to the interpretation that make it work better in the societal environment.
What makes for a successful religious organism? A successful scientific organism features highly persuasive contrast between nucleus and co-nucleus, and there is presumably some of that in the religious case too, practices of other religions preserved as persuasive examples of what not to do; likely the scientific species is partly descended from the religious. But there is also an interesting implication from the suggested religious model, that over many generations, a religious tradition will evolve to be amenable to a very wide range of interpretations, as this will allow the tradition to facilitate successful reproduction in a wide variety of societal environments. A successful tradition would therefore be an ambiguous one.
Can memetics become a normal science?There seem to be two problems with memetic research that have held it back.
One is that efforts in memetics have been dominated for decades by attempts to define what a meme is. The definition of gene was arrived at after extensive study of biological organisms; so presumably, one should expect extensive study of memetic organisms to be a prerequisite for arriving at a really good definition of meme. Identifying the organisms is a start.
The other has to do with what Kuhn called normal scientific research. This is the sort of research that takes place within a paradigm scientific field (a thriving scientific organism, that is). The paradigm usefully constrains the sorts of questions scientists are to ask and the sorts of answers they are to give (a nuance I didn't even try to capture in my rough portrait of scientific organisms, above). Kuhn describes such research as "puzzle solving", and its narrow focus is its strength, allowing a very great deal of focused work to be done so that, eventually, flaws lurking in the paradigm become impossible to ignore and a reproductive event is triggered — a scientific revolution, shifting things to another paradigm better describing reality.
But memetics hasn't provided that sort of structure.
There seems to be some potential, in the ideas I've proposed here, to define how memetic organisms are to be identified and analyzed, sufficiently that researchers might proceed methodically to find and study organisms. In other words, these suggestions might be developed into a functioning paradigm that could guide normal scientific research.
Maybe.
