memetics
memetics: A ‘meme’ means a unit of cultural evolution. Memetics
proposes that ideas can evolve in a way analogous to biological evolution.
Some ideas survive better than others; ideas can mutate through, for
example, misunderstandings; and two ideas can recombine to produce a
new idea involving elements of each parent idea.
Memetics has extended Darwinian evolution to culture. There exist several
exciting conclusions from doing that, for example the ability to predict
that ideas will spread not because we consider them "good ideas",
but because they contain "good memes" such as danger, food
and sex that push our evolutionary buttons and force us to pay attention
to them.
meme: the word "meme" represents a contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behaviour, causing them to propagate the pattern. (Term coined by evolutionist Richard Dawkins, by analogy with "gene".) Typical memes include individual slogans, catch-phrases, melodies, icons, inventions, and fashions. We do not consider an idea or information pattern as a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, to repeat it to someone else. Memetics considers all transmitted knowledge as memetic.
meme-complex: the phrase "meme-complex" represents a set of mutually-assisting memes which have co-evolved a symbiotic relationship. We consider religious and political dogmas, social movements, artistic styles, traditions and customs, chain letters, paradigms, languages, etc. as meme-complexes (also called an m-plex, or scheme (Hofstadter)).
memeseeding project pdf