Memetics
 | |
| Type | Theory of cultural evolution |
|---|---|
| Coined by | Richard Dawkins |
| Date | 1976 |
| Context | The Selfish Gene |
| Related concepts | Meme, replicator, dual-inheritance theory |
| Field | Cultural evolution, communication studies |
Memetics is an approach to cultural evolution that treats cultural information as replicators called memes. In memetic accounts, ideas, practices, expressions and other cultural forms spread through copying or imitation, vary as they are transmitted, and persist at different rates. The approach applies concepts derived from biological evolution to culture, but whether memes form discrete replicating units and whether the biological analogy produces useful explanations remain disputed.[1]
Biologist Richard Dawkins introduced the word meme in the 1976 book The Selfish Gene.[2] He proposed it as a name for a unit of cultural transmission or imitation, shortening the Greek-derived mimeme so that it would resemble gene. Dawkins's examples included tunes, catchphrases, ideas, clothing fashions and techniques for making objects.[3]
Replication and selection
Dawkins framed memes as replicators that propagate through a cultural environment. Copying need not be deliberate: a melody, belief or technique can spread because people remember it and reproduce it for others. In this model, a meme's success is not the same as its truth, usefulness or benefit to its human carriers; success means only that it continues to be copied.[3]
Dawkins applied three properties of biological replicators to memes: longevity, fecundity and copying fidelity. Longevity concerns the persistence of a pattern or its copies; fecundity concerns the rate at which it spreads; and fidelity concerns how accurately it is reproduced. He acknowledged that cultural transmission often changes its material more rapidly and extensively than genetic inheritance does.[3][1]
During the 1990s, memetics developed into an interdisciplinary research program. The peer-reviewed Journal of Memetics operated from 1997 to 2005, and Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (1999) became an influential but disputed contribution. Researchers nevertheless continued to disagree about what precisely counted as a meme.[2][1]
Internet memes
The popular meaning of internet meme is narrower and more concrete than the meme proposed in early memetics. It usually denotes a recognizable item of digital content, such as an image, phrase or video, that spreads online and often generates imitations or remixes. Communication scholar Limor Shifman distinguishes this vernacular usage from academic memetics, whose unit of analysis is more abstract and whose successful memes may persist over long periods. Internet-meme research can therefore use the language of transmission and variation without accepting memes as gene-like replicators.[2]
Criticism and later status
Critics of memetics argue that memes lack clear boundaries, a stable material basis and the copying fidelity usually expected of replicators. Cultural transmission also involves interpretation, intentional modification and social context, making it difficult to separate selection among memes from the choices and institutions of the people transmitting them. Other critics argue that memetics redescribes processes already studied by anthropology, linguistics and communication without adding testable explanatory mechanisms.[2][1]
Wilkins and Bourrat describe the memetic approach as largely abandoned as a general science of culture, although some of its insights have been incorporated into other evolutionary approaches. These include dual-inheritance theory, also called gene-culture coevolution, which models interactions between genetic and cultural inheritance without requiring culture to consist of autonomous meme-like replicators.[1]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 John S. Wilkins and Pierrick Bourrat (2022). "Replication and Reproduction". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved 22 September 2026.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Limor Shifman (26 March 2013). "Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker". Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Retrieved 22 September 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Richard Dawkins (1989). "The Selfish Gene, Chapter 11: Memes: the new replicators (pp. 192-201)". Oxford University Press. Retrieved 22 September 2026.