Rationally Speaking #24 - Memetics!
Rationally Speaking Podcast
New York City Skeptics
4.6 • 787 Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2010
⏱️ 48 minutes
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Summary
The term meme was introduced by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 bestseller "The Selfish Gene."Dawkins was trying to establish the idea that Darwinian evolution is a universal, almost logically necessary phenomenon. He couldn't, however, point to exobiological examples to reinforce the concept of universal Darwinism, so he turned to cultural evolution, renamed “ideas” as “memes” (in direct analogy with genes), and voilà, the field of memetics was born.
Despite staunch support by authors such as Susan Blackmore and Daniel Dennett, among others though, serious questions can be raised about memes and memetics as a viable concept and field of inquiry. To begin with, how is this different from classical studies of gene-culture co-evolution? Second, what, exactly are memes, i.e. what is their ontological status? Third, how do memes compete with each other, and for what resources? Is it even possible to build a functional ecology of memes, without which the statement that the most fit memes are those that spread becomes an empty tautology? Could this explain why the "Journal of Memetics" closed shop, or is it that they discovered everything there was to discover about memes?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education. |
| 0:22.6 | For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org. |
| 0:31.1 | Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. |
| 0:40.7 | I am your host, Massimo Piliucci, and with me as always is my co-host, Julia Galev. |
| 0:45.4 | Julia, what's our topic today? |
| 0:47.2 | Massimo, today's topic is memetics, which is a study of the concept of memes, which is a term originated by Richard Dawkins in his very popular |
| 0:57.5 | in 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, where he coined the word meme to refer to, roughly speaking, |
| 1:04.5 | ideas like language and stories and beliefs and customs, which he argued undergo evolution in a way similar to genes. |
| 1:13.2 | So the term memetics is a takeoff on genetics, the study of genes. |
| 1:17.7 | So the parallel, as I understand it, between memes and genes goes like this. |
| 1:23.4 | Genes are units of information that are copied and occasionally change or mutate during the copying process. |
| 1:31.3 | And they compete with each other, essentially, for limited resources. |
| 1:36.3 | So the information encoded in the gene influences whether that gene is more or less likely to propagate over time. |
| 1:43.3 | And the same is true of a meme. It's a |
| 1:45.9 | unit of information, an idea, that is copied either because people tell each other ideas or |
| 1:52.9 | people observe the behavior of other people and infer an idea from that behavior and so on. And |
| 1:59.0 | ideas frequently change dramatically as they're passed from person to |
| 2:03.4 | person throughout society over time. And ideas compete for limited resources, in this case, |
| 2:09.2 | space and attention in people's minds. And again, like genes, the nature of an idea, |
| 2:14.8 | the information content in it, influences how successful it's going |
| 2:18.3 | to be at that competition. So those three conditions, copying, one, with variation, two, and |
| 2:26.7 | with competition for survival, three, produce this process of Darwinian evolution. I'd say probably two of the most famous recent proponents of memetics are Daniel Dennett in his book's |
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