Who, I wonder, has actually picked up the rhetorical scientific glove thrown down by Dawkins when he first presented his meme idea? Meme transmission requires a physical medium, such as photons, sound waves, touch, taste, or smell because memes can be transmitted only through the senses.

But I was always open to the possibility that the meme might one day be developed into a proper hypothesis of the human mind. Others such as Bruce Edmonds and Robert Aunger have focused on the need to provide an empirical grounding for memetics to become a useful and respected scientific discipline. position has always been: There appear to be parallels, and there is no reason to believe that genes have a monopoly on being the agents of evolutionary change – now go to work, scientists! Opinions differ as to how best to apply the concept of memes within a "proper" disciplinary framework. It doesn’t even require the “parasites” to have a malicious bone in their bodies, just like the case of the fluke in the example.The word was introduced at the end of a book that otherwise must have seemed entirely devoted to extolling the "selfish" gene as the be-all and end-all of evolution, the fundamental unit of selection.

As Dawkins emphasised, natural selection is a ruthless judge of its subjects and any frailty, physical or behavioural, is almost inevitably rewarded by a rapid exit from the gene pool. Each tool-design thus acts somewhat similarly to a biological gene in that some populations have it and others do not, and the meme's function directly affects the presence of the design in future generations. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. The point he is trying to make is that memes, just like viruses, are indifferent to the welfare or otherwise of their hosts and the only thing that counts, from their perspective, is that they persist. I was hoping this piece would get some reaction, and I’ve been disappointed by the few comments I’ve received.Some commentators in the social sciences question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units, and are especially critical of the biological nature of the theory's underpinnings.

Observers distinguish the contagious imitation of memes from instinctively contagious phenomena such as yawning and laughing, which they consider innate (rather than socially learned) behaviors. For example, David Hull suggested that while memes might exist as Dawkins conceives of them, he finds it important to suggest that instead of determining them as idea "replicators" (i. Architectural memes, according to Salingaros, can have destructive power: "Images portrayed in architectural magazines representing buildings that could not possibly accommodate everyday uses become fixed in our memory, so we reproduce them unconsciously. He hypothesized that one could view many cultural entities as replicators, and pointed to melodies, fashions and learned skills as examples. Huxley (1880) claimed that "The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world.Gottsch discusses the transmission, mutation and selection of religious memeplexes and the theistic memes contained.

Atran contends that the same is true for meme, it can be a useful idea for casual discussion and for introducing the idea that there is more to the science of psychology than just understanding neurobiology but the idea of “selfish memes” (which the author expressed here) that replicate for their own sake the way genes do doesn’t hold up because memes, unlike genes are not accurate replicators. In that context, Dawkins defined the meme as a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation and replication, but later definitions would vary. On the memetic approach, a given culture at a given moment in time is best described by listing the memes present in that culture at that time and the (relative and absolute) frequencies of these memes. For Dawkins, the meme exemplified another self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.For broad appeal, a meme might appeal to dissatisfaction and provide rough explanations for why things are going wrong. Memes can be typed in terms of their informational content (the information they carry) and informational format (the way the information is coded). And, as per my previous comments to Mark, I’ll bet there’s no shortage of people who are poo-pooing the idea because they would rather stick with what they know than expand the frontiers of knowledge. Cultural memes will have the characteristic of Lamarckian inheritance when a host aspires to replicate the given meme through inference rather than by exactly copying it.