TheSelfishGene

Dawkins is a good example of why scientists should not try to do philosophy (there are other equally good examples of why philosophers should not try to do science). Most actual philosophers (as opposed to amateur internet-philosophers) have paid 'memetics' exactly the attention it deserves, which is none at all.

Which doesn't stop it from being annoying that nowadays 'meme' is used as a synonym for 'craze'. Dawkins' idea was bollocks, yes, but it was interesting bollocks and deserves to be treated as such, not debased.

Well, if an idea is a meme, then a craze is a particularly successful meme, which dies out very quickly after saturating its environment.  It's just the most obvious form of meme.  And no, mimetics isn't supposed to be taken literally - but it is a VERY handy metaphor for expressing the exchange of information.  (If we had some theory for encoding an idea, and a theory for the transformation of ideas into other ideas when they are put together then it would also be a useful theory.)  --Vitenka

Not really. The idea behind memetics, if I recall from reading the book years ago, is that 'memes' are to conceptual entities as genes are to creatures: they get stuck together to form stories, ideas, fashions, and whatnot. And then these can combine in different ways: so, say you have two stories, one about a fisher-king who sacrifices himself to bring fertility to his land, and one about John Barleycorn who every year dies and is born again. These meet and combine into a story about a king who dies and then comes to life again in December every year, thus bringing the land out of winter. So far, so reasonable.

Where it gets silly is introducing the idea of selection, which is the whole point of memetics: to describe why some stories, ideas, etc stick around and others die out. The concept here is that stories which are more 'successful', more 'suited to their environment' (by analogy with Dawkins' field, biology) survive while those which don't die.

Except -- this doesn't in fact explain anything. In the physical world, it's obvious what 'more successful' means: can survive on less food, can hunt better, more resistant to disease, what-have-you. But trying to apply it to stories and ideas, you're reduced to question-begging. What makes a 'meme' successful? We don't know. How can we tell if it's successful? Only by seeing whether it's a success or not. And what is more, there doesn't seem to be any 'rules' for success or not. So in fact the analogy between genes and memes breaks down at this vital step, and what starts off as an interesting idea in fact leads us... around in circles, ending up no nearer to understanding anything than we were before.

Which is why the concept is an interesting intellectual curiosity, but of zero use in any serious philosophical endeavor. It tells us nothing we didn't already know, and, worse, sends us off on the wrong track looking for what makes a 'successful' 'meme': a philosophical wild goose chase, as if there haven't been enough of those over the years.

In short: bollocks.

But, that's exactly what Darwin's theories have too.  Survival of the fittest to do what?  To survive.  Survival of the survivors (insert bad mimetic tie-in joke here).  Admittedly, the 'environment' in which a story fragment lives is hard to explain - and the idea of survival of the survivors on its own isn't very useful - but we can perhaps use it as a basis for developing more theories.

Identically - the environment in which a gene lives is determined by the actions of other genes.  The whole point is that it is not a global 'survivability' value which is being maximised, but instead a local 'can I survive against other competitors' maxima.  PeterTaylor requests that Vitenka tidy that sentence - maxima is a plural and thus incompatible with "a", but I don't think singularising it helps improve the sense of the sentence much.  And if you make gross simplifications (eg. a human mind can hold x ideas, and will communicate n of them per second, a meme is retained and chosen to be communicated based upon stuff internal to it that we don't understand) then you can start using the theory, and seeing how well it maps on to existence - and then maybe start deducing those rules (or improving your simplifications)  --Vitenka (It's not just a sorta fun philosophy, it really is a workable theory for communicating between agents)

It's a model, but it's the wrong model. It's based on a flawed analogy. And, to use a non-flawed analogy, imagine a graph with three points. You can fit any curve with order three or greater through them, if you pick your values carefully (you might also be able to fit a line or a squared-curve through them as well). But if you choose the wrong model, if you think it's a fourth-order curve when it's actually a fifth-, you'll end up on completely the wrong track. Which is where memetics would lead, if anyone paid any attention to it (fortunately, they don't -- though they do go off on enough dead ends, so perhaps one more wouldn't make any difference).

Well, undoubtably it's the wrong model for some (or most) types of research - that doesn't make it the wrong model for all types of research.  Plus, if CellularAutomata research goes anywhere, wrong model or not, it might be a sufficiently good model to use for computations and simulations.  --Vitenka

No, not 'wrong model' in the sense of 'Newtonian mechanics is the wrong model to use near the speed of light, but it's a good enough approximation for some types of research'. It's more like Aristotlian physics, which is never the right model (unless parmae are involved).