An
Afterword on Memes
Memes are ideas that
accumulate people. There are many
memes that are common across cultures such as memes related to food preferences,
family relationships, sexual access, childrearing, political and economic
practices and religion.
Since the term was
first coined in the mid-1970’s by Richard Dawkins in the last chapter of his
book entitled The Selfish Gene, the
science of memetics has come a long way but is still in its theoretical
adolescence. There are differing views mainly between those who believe that the
only memes worthy of study are those that directly support biological survival
and reproduction and genetic transmission such as cultural ideas regarding
mating, family and social interaction, and those who take a looser
interpretation to include all self-replicating and contagious ideas that spread
throughout human populations for one reason or another. Some memes are adaptive and spring more
directly from biological adaptations, some may be indirectly adaptive and others
may have no adaptive value whatsoever.
I believe all memes are interesting and worthy of study whether they are
directly adaptive or not because many memes are very contagious among humans and
have many interesting effects.
Memetics asks not how people accumulate ideas but how ideas accumulate
people.
The survival and
reproduction promoting functions of many memes are obvious and they are usually
the big universal cultural ideas such as the economics of survival, mating,
family, and social control and direction.
Other big ones but with perhaps more indirect functions are religion,
art, mythology, philosophy and science.
Religion is a powerful meme machine with both direct and indirect
survival and reproduction functions.
Think of all the ways that religious memes hold human minds. Ideas like divine reward and punishment
and eternal afterlife are all pretty compelling. Religious memes related to sex
and family can promote sexual reproduction and survival through the family unit
(Be fruitful and multiply but don’t mess around with your neighbor’s wife). Religious memes can also immunize its
host against other religious memes by making them believe that theirs is the
only true religion. Religion
can also be said to have important mental health and social solidarity and
control features that may directly or indirectly contribute to a human’s
survival and reproduction.