Do you know what a meme is?

[Turtle]

... In Bhagwad Gita Lord Krishna is said to have said Soul is immortal.

Did he have memes; thoughts; information in mind when he said so?:evil:

 

:cup: :cup: :cup: :cup: :)

 

Life after death is a meme, yes. A heavily exploited one I might add. ;)

[Dov Henis]

From:

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-P81pQcU1dLBbHgtjQjxG_Q--?cq=1&p=192

 

...and since the SciAm book review brings in also "memes", a term I have seen occasionally but so far not ever looked up, I now searched and found:

 

" As defined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976): 'a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation'. '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 memory...'

 

Gee wheez and double wow! how elegant and wise! The coupled words/terms 'communications' and 'memories' and their connotations are simply too mundane and not scientific, sophisticated or impressive enough...

 

Some people do get high on verbiage..."

 

Dov

[Michaelangelica]

Is the passing on of cultural behaviours a meme?

Macaques are known to transmit acquired knowledge to each other. Scientists observed a female macaque washing a sweet potato before eating it. She was the first one to be observed doing this behavior.

Soon after, the rest of her troop began washing their sweet potatoes before eating them.

 

This behavior then apparently spread rapidly through all macaque groups in Japan.

This phenomenon led to the Hundredth Monkey Meme — that after a certain number of monkeys learn new behavior this behavior somehow will spread throughout monkey-kind.

It was also believed this that theory explains how ideas are spread in human societies. The theory, though discredited, persists, particularly among New Agers.

 

http://japundit.com/archives/2006/02/01/1934/

[Pyrotex]

...that I hold that memes are completely dependent on the social ecology of the mind itself, and you hold that it is dependent on the social ecology of the populus. ...

I'm also one of those realists who think that the debate about Internalism and Externalism is a waste of time. [kudos Buffy]

Look at the original metaphor Dawkins was trying to capture:

DNA is entirely "internal" to the cell, and we consider it the holy grail of reproduction and inheritance. Indeed, it only takes two humans to make a third and no society or ecosystem is required.

 

However, DNA manifests itself "externally" as number of legs, eye color, size, presence of wings, AND the animal's fitness for and impact upon an ecosystem (these are the "phenotypes" of DNA). It was the observation of external attributes that led to the discovery of the rules of inheritance and thence to DNA as a coding scheme for inheritance. The "internal" and the "external" cannot be separated and yield a useful science of genetics.

 

Likewise, memes, though passed internally into the mind where they "reside" are observed only through their external manifestations. The child imitates the parents. We observe that. There it is: meme transfer. And at the same time, this is the atomic underpinning of culture and society as well. If you have two or more people living together and interacting, you have a "culture".

 

It is suggested that the least philosophically problematic constitution for a science of memetics would be to adopt a behaviourist stance towards memes, to restrict the use of the term to those replicating cultural phenomena which can be directly observed or measured (Benzon 1996). This would release us from the difficulties of the indefinable meme-host relationship, and also have the merit of making memetics more directly comparable to animal behavioural ecology, to the existing branch of social psychology known as social contagion theory, and to the sociological field of empirical diffusion studies.

 

So, Buffy is right. "Internalistic" memetics may be "simple" but it is also useless. Just as genetics must reflect DNA ("genotypes") and its physical observable manifestations ("phenotypes") to be of any value as a science, so must memetics reflect both the idea-host paradigm and its external (cultural, behavioral) manifestations if it is to have any value as a science.

[Pyrotex]

P.S. I am sorry to have to report this, but the "Hundredth Monkey" meme that has raged throughout human society for years, is a false story, a hoax. Though the washing of sweet potatoes by macaques was indeed observed in one population, it did not spread from that beach.

 

The original telling of the 100 Monkeys occurred in a pulp science fiction magazine in the 1930's. And it had many scientific references at the end of the article. They were bogus. Later, other magazines and journals repeated the story, embellishing it of course, and referenced the same bogus references. As time went on, 3rd generation articles pointed to the initial flurry of journal articles (2nd generation 100 Monkey stories). At this point, to many folks, the referencing of actual articles in actual journals made this story a fact. There was even an instance of a 3rd generation article being published in the same journal under the same title as one of the bogus references in the initial story!! How's THAT for confusing?

 

But the meme goes on. It found fertile ground in minds aculturated to enjoy the paranormal and the strange.

 

P.S.: I found a very educational and thought provoking link

http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1998/vol2/gatherer_d.html