October 17, 2005
"Memes, the New Replicators" by Dawkins
This reading is located here.
This is pretty heavy stuff. Dawkins implies that memes (see the wikipedia article on memes), as replicators, have a destiny to supersede DNA as the primary replicator on the planet. The idea is that ideas have a life of their own, not just metaphorically but technically, in the same way that genes do. They exist as neuronal structures within human brains and are transmitted from human to human much like a virus.
Instantaneous global communcation really gives memes some teeth with which to chomp away at the dominance of genes as the primary replicators on the planet. The paper I read was written in 1989 (originally in 1976), before the advent of the internet, at least in popular culture, so Dawkins doesn't mention much of the possibility of global media to spread memes, but it is clear that if memes are indeed destined to
Dawkins seems a little awestruck at the speed that memes are able to mutate and evolve as opposed to genes. He cites the fact that the memes of language have changed so much in only 20 generations that Chaucer would not be able to understand a contemporary person speaking English. The reason for this is quite clear: How many times have you passed on your genes in this lifetime? And how many ideas have you helped to spread?
Memes have big speed advantage over genes. I have a hard time setting the two up as opposed or competing entities, however. If anything, it seems like memes are dependent on genes. Memes can be spread by non-human means, of course (e.g., books), but, to adapt the famous zen koan, does a meme exist if it has no genes to perceive it?
As an interesting aside, Dawkins, when explaining in detail the memtic evolution of the song Auld Lang Syne, which in its original version starts with the line "For auld lang syne" but now is often sung as "For the sake of auld lang syne." Dawkins argues that this is evidence of a memetic mutation taking hold: In a situation where the song is being sung, if one person accidentally sings "for the sake of", the sibilant 's' and the penetrating 'k' are striking enough to break through the other voices and a child listening and wanting to sing along but not knowing the words clearly hears some words (a word, "sake") that he can identify and latch onto, so when the refrain comes around again, he sings it differently.
This struck me because I always remembered in Church amusing myself by listening to the hisses that blanketed the room on every sussuration.
Posted October 17, 2005 03:22 PM. Categories: Week 6 | Permalink