The meme theory

by osmosis 10 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  osmosis

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

  The basic idea of the meme theory is that thoughts and information have a life of their own. They are born, they evolve, they die. They pass from one person to another, with the people acting as hosts for the memes.

  If meme theory is correct, then it can easily be seen how a meme could be self-propogating. For example, some memes could flourish by instructing their hosts to reproduce as quickly and as often as possible (think catholics). Some memes could flourish by instructing their hosts to attack other hosts with conflicting memes (think holy crusades). Memes could also be beneficial to their hosts (think not eating pork at a time when there's no such thing as a refrigerator).

  Has anyone else ever given this theory any serious consideration? Personally, I think meme theory "works", and goes a long way toward explaining certain beliefs.
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  PopeOfEruke

  I forgot what I wanted to say.

  Pope
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  Nina

  Same thought.

  Nina
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  stillajwexelder

  no but I have stayed at a holiday inn express
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  peacefulpete

  Its what drives culture, convention, ethics, philosophy and everything else that we consider uniquely human. Considering that biological evolution generally requires tens even hundreds of thousands of years for significant change humans have biologically changed very little from the first Homo Sapiens. Yet as a result of this phenomenon of memenic evolution humans have risen from stone throwers to space travelers.
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  yaddayadda

  these days all anyone cares about is me me me....is that meme theory?
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  ballistic

  This was the very first thing I stumbled across the first day I got the internet (but obviously not on wikipedia). I found it quite interesting but couldn't help thinking that meme theory was a meme in itself.
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  Panda

  Would this correlate to the physical selfish gene?
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  Panda

  UMMMM .. maybe it's from the Sound of Music Do Ray MEme
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  Pole

  :Has anyone else ever given this theory any serious consideration? Personally, I think meme theory "works", and goes a long way toward explaining certain beliefs.
  
  The meme theory is probably little more than a nice metaphor suggested by Dawkins to explain how ideas emerge in societies. There is even a subfield of sociology called 'memetics' which deals with identyfying the origins and evolution of ideas ('memes'). I happen to be involved in one project that gives this 'theory' some consideration, but - as I said - we don't treat it as a real theory, but rather as an inspiring metaphor. So what we do is we compile a large database of transcripts of parliamentary debates spanning 15 years or so. Then we use statistical methods of language processing to determine which MPs first came up with certain ideas and how these ideas propagated and evolved ever since.
  
  Pole