Talk:Meme/Archive 2

Clean up the article
I'm just stopping by, because I needed to edit the Jedi link, as we've come to a concensus on a title change. And I just need to say: clean up the article. What it says about "the religious right" is totally the author's opinion, independent research. Not facts. If that's from a "Memecist's viewpoint", say that. Otherwise, delete it.

memetic evolution
In the sentence that reads, "It is probable that mutation directed language to culturally evolve from a handful of primitive syllables into the modern wide array of dialects..." it says that mutation 'directed' language to evolve. Earlier while reading the article I read that memes have no interest in the environment and that they are simply replicated or not. How can mutation 'direct' something it has no interest in? I think it implies that mutation is a thing with a conscious that can make inteligent choices. lol Jaberwocky6669 08:42, Jan 1, 2005 (UTC)

I have another question as well. From what I gather from this article a meme can assist in the evolution of people, objects, and ideas and a meme can cause the evolution of people, objects, and ideas to cease. What should give one meme a decided advantage over another meme? Does the answer lie withen the meme itself as in the meme is "better" than another meme. Maybe the answer lies in how the meme is thought of and used by humans. Jaberwocky6669 09:29, Jan 1, 2005 (UTC)

This article reads like a magazine article also. I can't just choose a starting place in the article and dive right on in. I think the individual subheadings need to all be revised by someone who knows much more about memes than I do, lol. For example, if I just wanted to refer to the history of memes subheading and not to anything else I would have to become a scholar of memes just to understand anything it said! Jaberwocky6669 09:56, Jan 1, 2005 (UTC)

I mean seriously, the article reads like an internet forum and not like an encyclopedia. I want to be able to come to this article for the first time and come away from it knowing something I never knew before. I don't want to have to be a biologist or a sociologist in order to understand an encyclopedia entry. The article needs to be seriously unified. One paragraph reads as if someone included their own ideas about what a meme is and then someone came along and added their own ideas and simply left the other guys ideas because he didnt want to start problems. Thats why I seriously changed everything around in order to show that their is no cohesion from one sub-heading to the next! Jaberwocky6669 10:04, Jan 1, 2005 (UTC) I'm done, I think...

someone finish this and add it
It needs polishing and needs a better example. I'm just trying to explain the idea that memes can be made up of other memes, or can be transferred and broken up, etc. a large meme dies when it is no longer passed in its entirety, but if it is simply broken into two pieces, the individual pieces can be thought of as longer-lasting memes:

Thoughts as discrete units
Although memes are thought of as discrete units, this is not meant to imply that thoughts are somehow quantized or that there are "atomic" ideas that cannot be broken into smaller pieces. The meme as a unit is simply a convenient way of saying "a piece of thought that is copied from person to person", regardless of whether that thought contains others inside it.

For example, if a person tells the phrase "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise", to a friend, it can be considered a meme. If the friend then parodies the proverb (a memetic mutation) and passes "Early to bed, early to rise, and your girl goes out with other guys" on to a third person, the "Early to bed, early to rise..." meme has survived two generations, while each entire proverb (which are also memes) have only survived one.

- Omegatron 23:47, Jan 2, 2005 (UTC)

I think that I understand what you are trying to say but I'm still not sure. This makes me think of a question I thought of earlier while previewing the article. The definition that a meme is a unit of information replicated from information stores to other info stores is a good definition, but I wonder, how can you measure a unit of information? How can information be measured? Very good thoughts Omegatron, you got me thinkin'... Oh yeah, this reminds me of another thought I had. I mentioned previously in this talk page about how could one meme be better than another or is it how the meme is untilized,


 * See Information theory, Computational Complexity Theory, Andrey Kolmogorov and 'Kolmogorov complexity', Entropy Claude E. Shannon etc... --maru 21:22, 10 May 2005 (UTC)


 * I am just going by Dawkin's definition of a gene, which I assume is the same as his definition of a meme (I am not quite to that chapter yet. :-)  )  His definition of a gene is simply a piece of genetic code that replicates, whether it is a few base pairs or an entire chromosome, as long as it is passed from one individual to the next.  So if a single chunk of code survives through 10 generations, it is considered a gene.  It could also be considered two genes that happen to be next to each other.  The survival of each smaller gene could be longer, however, if they last longer as individual units.  I am not sure how best to word it about memes, though. - Omegatron

I wonder, has evolution and survival all been based on rules that can be controlled, or are the fixed and immutable? If everything were to start over again would it turn out to be the same? Jaberwocky6669 00:40, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)


 * The only "rule" is that things that tend to survive will tend to survive. "Survival of the fittest" simply means "survival of those that are best at surviving".  So no, the rule is immutable.  If everything were to start over again, it would certainly not be the same, because of random variations, but it would probably be similar.  See convergent evolution.  - Omegatron 01:40, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

But what makes something better at surviving over another? If a method of survival can be "better" than another, how is that determined? Jaberwocky6669 22:15, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)


 * Hmmm... A method of survival that is better than another is determined by it surviving where the other doesn't.  It's basically an obvious tautology that we just aren't able to see as such.  Things that are good at surviving will tend to be the only things you see.  Things that are bad at surviving die and produce no copies of themselves.  What specifically causes things to be better at surviving?  Lots of things.  Efficiency of converting energy into different forms, ability to produce an optimum number of children for a certain environment, being able to steal energy from other creatures by eating them, etc. - Omegatron 20:18, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

Darwinian evolution as a meme?
What about adding Darwinian evolution to the list of memes? See Darwin's Dangerous Idea. gK &iquest;? 04:33, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The list of memes
C'mon people. We're not going to list every meme that exists. That would require writing down every idea that forms our society. We should be cutting down the list, not trying to think of more. To just a few examples that each demonstrate an important aspect of memes and then leave it at that. - Omegatron 05:15, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

History of the term "Meme"
I found the following paragraphs in an analysis of the ending of the Hideo Kojima video game, Metal Gear Solid 2. I noticed this wiki entry doesn't seem to be clear on the source of memes, so I'll post add it to the discussion page, as I don't want to edit the main one myself. That, and I don't know enough about the concept to be able to edit it. They're quoted from Richard Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene":


 * "What, after all, is so special about genes ? The answer is that they are replicators. The laws of physics are supposed to be true all over the accessible universe. Are there any principles of biology that are likely to have similar universal validity ? When astronauts voyage to distant planets and look for life, they can expect to find creatures too strange and unearthly for us to imagine. But is there anything that must be true of all life, wherever it is found, and whatever the basis of its chemistry ? If forms of life exist whose chemistry is based on silicon rather than carbon, or ammonia rather than water, if creatures are discovered that boil to death at -100 degrees centigrade, if a form of life is found that is not based on chemistry at all but on electronic reverberating circuits, will there still be any general principle that is true of all life ? Obviously I do not know but, if I had to bet, I would put my money on one fundamental principle. This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity that prevails on our planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain other conditions are met, they will almost inevitable tend to become the basis for an evolutionary process."


 * "But do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicator and other, consequent, kinds of evolution ? I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval [primordial] soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind."


 * "The new soup is the soup of human culture. 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'."


 * "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. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.'"

Source: http://junkerhq.net/MGS2/index.html

memes, viruses, genes
there's several different ideas expressed in this article. gene-like memes, virus-like memes, etc. i'm not really sure how to clean it up but it should be cleaned up. :-) after all, viruses are made of genes, too.  but viruses are organisms containing a whole chunk of genes that get transmitted at once.  a virus is more like a meme-plex in this case, yet everyone speaks of viral marketing and mind viruses.  hmmm... - Omegatron 20:49, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

Inclusion of meme concepts in other articles
Many of the concepts in meme apply to other articles, such as diffusion (anthropology) and diffusion of innovations. Those articles could be enriched through discussion of memes, comparison with diffusion, and explanation of how memes act as agents of diffusion. --Westendgirl 03:46, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Also, isn't a memeplex the same as an ideology? Certainly there's a close link between these concepts.