Because it came up somewhere else: The Meme

[Ian David]

The Virian Lexicon
MEME: (pron. `meem') A contagious information pattern that replicates by symbiotically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern. (Term coined by Dawkins, by analogy with "gene".) Individual slogans, catch-phrases, melodies, icons, inventions, and fashions are typical memes. An idea or information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, to repeat it to someone else. All transmitted knowledge is memetic. (Wheelis, quoted in Hofstadter.) (See meme-complex).

More:
http://www.churchofvirus.org/lexicon_4.html#mc


Also:

The Meme Machine, by Dr. Susan Blackmore

Extract from the foreword by Richard Dawkins
(Dawkins invented the term `meme' in 1976)

Strange Creatures
We humans are strange creatures. There is no doubt that our bodies evolved by natural selection just as other animals' did. Yet we differ from all other creatures in many ways. For a start we speak. We believe ourselves to be the most intelligent species on the planet. We are extraordinarily widespread and extremely versatile in our ways of making a living. We wage wars, believe in religions, bury our dead, and get embarrassed about sex. We watch television, drive cars and eat ice cream. We have had such a devastating impact upon the ecosystems of our planet that we appear to be in danger of destroying everything on which our lives depend. One of the problems of being a human is that it is rather hard to look at humans with an unprejudiced eye.

On the one hand, we are obviously animals comparable with any others. We have lungs, hearts and brains made of living cells; we eat and breathe and reproduce. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection can successfully explain how we, along with the rest of life on this planet, came to be here and why we all share so many characteristics. On the other hand we behave quite differently from other animals. Now that biology has so successfully explained much of our similarity with other creatures we need to ask the opposite question. What makes us so different? Could it be our superior intelligence, our consciousness, our language, or what?

A common answer is that we are simply more intelligent than any other species. Yet the notion of intelligence is extremely slippery, with interminable arguments about how to define it, how to measure it and to what extent it is inherited. Research in artificial intelligence (AI) has provided some nice surprises for those who thought they knew what makes human intelligence so special.

In the early days of AI, researchers thought that if they could teach a computer to play chess they would have reproduced one of the highest forms of human intelligence. In those days the idea that a computer could ever play well, let alone beat a Grand Master, was unthinkable. Yet now most home computers come with passable chess programs already installed, and in 1997 the program "Deep Blue" beat World Champion Garry Kasparov ending human supremacy at the game. Computers may not play chess in the same way as humans, but their success shows how wrong we can be about intelligence. Clearly what we thought were human beings' most special capabilities may not be.

More:
http://www.geneticengineering.org/memetics/susan_blackmore.html



Also:

Meme
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Meme, (rhymes with "cream" and comes from Greek root with the meaning of memory and its derivative "mimeme"), is the term given to a unit of information that replicates from brains and inanimate stores of information, such as books and computers, to other brains or stores of information. The term meme was coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins in his bestselling book, The Selfish Gene. Inanimate sources of information have been termed 'retention systems'.

In more specific terms, a meme is a self-propagating unit of cultural evolution having some resemblance to the gene (the unit of genetics). The difference lies in the replicative potential and minimally required resources to replicate. Memes can represent parts of ideas, languages, elemental particles, tunes, designs, skills, moral and aesthetic values and anything else that is commonly learned and passed on to others as a unit. The study of evolutionary models of information transfer is called memetics.

In casual use, the term meme is sometimes used to mean any piece of information that is passed from one mind to another. This is much closer to the analogy of "language as a virus" than it is to Dawkins's analogy of memes as replicating behaviors. Memes on the internet tend to proliferate for periods of time then quietly die off, and many start as obscure running jokes within net cliques which gradually lose their original meaning or otherwise become detached. Some people consider absurdist humor to be a good source of memes.

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

[glitch]

1. Great links. The Virian Lexicon needs to add "epideme" to it's lexicon.

Meme epidemic. I think that's what we're facing now. Good stuff, thanks for posting.