The Science of Self-Spreading Beliefs
(thoughtcontagion.com)
Thought contagions are beliefs or ideas that "program" for their own spreading-- ultimately affecting whole societies. By their strong effects on how we live, such ideas secure self-propagation by inducing evangelism, abundant childraising and dropout prevention. Ideas harnessing these human functions most effectively win out over weaker variants. Evolving like life forms, through evolution by natural selection, thought contagions vie for ever stronger influence in human lives. Thought contagions range from fast rumors to slowly spreading traditional religions. The practical implications extend to high benefit, low cost ways of improving education while reducing teacher "burnout"; violence reduction, racism, neo-fascism, religious strife, overpopulation, street gangs, financial markets, apocalyptic religion, fad diets, child raising, how children's games spread, abortion clashes, sexual politics, gay bashing, war, terrorism, AIDS, drug policy, recursive marketing, raising the creative output of individuals, organizations, or societies, global security, and many other areas.
Brief Example: Consider the belief that you need to find a romantic partner of a "compatible" astrological sign. This idea causes singles who have it to raise the subject of astrological sign compatibility with each new potential partner, in order to determine compatibility. So the idea exploits human mating drives to get itself copied into more minds. It is a "sexually transmitted belief," implicitly telling some hosts to send several copies of this idea to potential partners before accepting anyone for further dating. That includes people moved to spread the idea without though they do not hold winning converts as an objective. Resembling a paperless chain letter in some ways, the thought contagion also behaves in humans much as a computer virus behaves in computers. Though it does not erase its hosts’ memory, it can make it harder to find a partner deemed "compatible" by arbitrarily narrowing the field. So like a sexually transmitted microorganism, astrology ideas use human mating for their own reproduction. Even in couples who are not serious enough about astrology to promptly stop dating over an "incompatibility" finding, the astrological idea may still plant a seed of doubt that can favor giving up in the face of real relationship challenges when they arise. If the number of persuadable unbelievers in astrological dating is still high enough, the astrological idea can "win" by causing couples to break up: breakups move people back to dating--and back to discussing astrology with new people. There is thus an evolutionary conflict between the astrological belief and the genes of its host, and this conflict changes with changing prevalence of the idea and those susceptible to it. If, for instance, susceptible non-hosts of the belief become quite rare, then variants of the belief might "win" by reducing breakups and favoring more parent to child idea transmission. (A continued supply of young people reaching dating age without learning astrological dating beliefs from their parents probably stops this from happening, especially if many parents drop the idea by the time their children grow up.) This is not all that the new theory has to say about astrology, and astrology is not a special case. Similar analyses shed fresh light on a vast range of ancient religions and recent ideologies. (Further analysis of astrological beliefs in Thought Contagion and here.)
Old or New? Analogies between cultural evolution and biological evolution have been around for over a century, as have comparisons between contagious ideas and contagious microorganisms. William James, for instance, published an 1880 essay comparing cultural and biological evolution, while Gustave Le Bon discussed contagion of ideas in his 1895 book The Crowd. Various ideas of social evolution go back long before Darwin's time, as documented by J. W. Burrow's book Evolution and Society (London: Cambridge University Press, 1966). Thought contagion theory does not merely continue these lines of work with new topics, but incorporates a new approach as well: the evolutionary epidemiology of ideas. In connection to microorganisms, the field of evolutionary epidemiology was called "an emerging discipline" by biologist Paul Ewald in his 1994 book, Evolution of Infectious Disease (Oxford University Press)--see also Ewald's "The Evolution of Virulence," Scientific American, April 1993. This theory is not simply contagion, nor simply evolution, nor even contagion plus evolution. Rather, it is evolution happening through distinctly epidemiological mechanisms and dynamics. Thought contagion theory considers the evolutionary epidemiology not of biological germs, but of ideas. It does so in a neutral context: much as there can be harmful or beneficial infectious organisms, so too can there be harmful or beneficial infectious ideas- -and many intermediate possibilities. As it happens, the first draft of Thought Contagion was finished in 1993, and earlier work was also done without using Ewald's work as a source of metaphor. Yet even if evolutionary thought contagion theory were a metaphor (which it is not, as noted below), it would have to be a metaphor to a newly emerging biological discipline. The book Thought Contagion also opens a new branch in the Library of Congress catalog system called "Contagion (Social Psychology)." (Because of its semi-popular reading level, Thought Contagion only uses the term "epidemiology" 6 times, though it uses the term "evolutionary" more often. Readers can appreciate the newness of its material without knowing technical words, but academic works in thought contagion science mention "evolutionary epidemiology" more often.) Works featured on these pages focus on the truly recursive evolutionary aspects of mass social phenomena, rather than simply jargonizing established fields such as psychology, sociology, Machiavellian theory, marketing science, etc. with new buzzwords. Readers of both the popular and scholarly works will often notice the "ordinary" question of how people acquire ideas turned on its head, by opening the likewise legitimate question of how ideas acquire people.
Isn't this the evolutionary
replicator
theory of culture invented by Richard Dawkins? No. Evolutionary replicator theory of culture was not
invented by
Richard Dawkins, but goes back at least to anthropologist F. T.
Cloak, who
discussed it in his 1973 paper "Elementary Self-Replicating
Instructions and
Their Works: Toward a Radical Reconstruction of General Anthropology
Through a
General Theory of Natural Selection" presented at the Ninth
International
Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. (In Cloak's
very broad
usage, genes also count as "instructions," hence the generality of
the theory of
natural selection presented in that paper.) The idea of Dawkins as
originator of
evolutionary cultural replicator theory has become so widespread and
often
communicated (due to Dawkins's popular writing style, ongoing
publicity,
particular ways of describing the history, etc., and Cloak's
technical style,
obscure modes of publication, and lack of self-promotion) that even
people who
have read Cloak's early papers and forgotten their publication dates
can acquire
the idea of crediting the theory's origin to Dawkins.
Cloak, who was never a popularizer,
was praised
by former American Psychological Association president Donald
Campbell as
"...one of the most meticulous and creative thinkers about social
evolution..."
(American Psychologist 31, p. 381, 1976). A 1975 paper by
Cloak titled
"Is a Cultural Ethology Possible" [Human Ecology 3(3): 161-
182] that goes
into less detail than the 1973 paper has been more widely cited--
partly because
of where it was published but perhaps also because a 1968 version by
the same
title was published in Research Reviews 15(1): 37-47. [To make
the 1973
paper more easily available to scientists and scholars, a scanned
version (3.4
megabytes total) is now online with permission from the author.] The
1975 paper,
which was cited by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (Oxford
University Press,
1976), does discuss the self-replication and natural selection of
brain-stored
cultural items, as well as elementary self-replicating instructions
in general.
But it does not handle these subjects as formally and symbolically as
the 1973
paper. Instead, Cloak's 1975 paper refers readers to the 1973 paper
for
elaboration of the theory. Both works follow the cultural
microevolution studies
conducted in a village of Trinidad during 1963 to 1965 that were the
basis of
Cloak's 1966 Ph.D dissertation, and clearly are not products
of "armchair
theorizing." Early discussion of provisionally proposed "units of
cultural
instruction" and their self-propagating effects also appears in
Cloak's short
1966 paper "Cultural Microevolution," [Research Previews 13:
(2) p.
7-10.] The present evolutionary epidemiology of ideas, as a branch of
evolutionary cultural replicator theory, can be seen as further
development of
certain aspects of Cloak's work after some independent reinvention.
It provides
numerous examples of evolutionary replicator analysis giving distinct
new
insights for large societies, with emphasis on the practical
significance of the
theory in large societies. It does not, however, offer to explain all
social or
cultural phenomena nor even all cultural evolution and transmission
phenomena.
As for the
word
"replicator," it is documented in the Oxford English
Dictionary, Second
Edition, as going back to the early 1960s in connection with biology
and the
more general meaning of "that which replicates." No mention is made
of Dawkins
as the source of the word "replicator." While Dawkins did not
originate
evolutionary replicator theory or the word "replicator," he did
originate the
word "meme" with this particular English spelling and gave some
examples in his
13-page chapter "Memes: The New Replicators." That, however, does not
mean that
Dawkins should be credited with Cloak's evolutionary cultural
replicator work
any more than the originator of the word "gene" (Johannsen) should be
credited
with launching Mendelian genetics. Unfortunately, Dawkins did not
give the word
"meme" a formal definition in 1976, leading to a profusion of
definitions being
made by people trying to fill the void. Dawkins did clarify in his
1982 book
The Extended Phenotype (W. H. Freeman and Company) that "a
meme should be
regarded as a unit of information residing in a brain (Cloak's 'i-
culture')" [p.
109]. Moreover, by the time he published The Blind
Watchmaker (W.
W. Norton & Company, 1986), Dawkins had given still another
definition to
indicating that "memes" exist in various media, rendering the term
less specific
without noting that the definition was being changed again. Moreover,
the new
definition was given without explaining its value to scientific
communications
or to explaining a particular development in evolutionary cultural
replicator
theory or describing an empirical result. Without justifying the
change, Dawkins
may have given critics the idea that the definition of terms was
being treated
as if it did not matter, creating a widespread sense that something
other than
science was being done. Skeptics might have suspected that the word
was simply
coined first, and a search for definitions and purposes launched
afterward--raising questions about whether the word arose through
scientific
methods. Changing definitions may also have conveyed the impression
of an Oxford
professor fumbling for a definition and thus needing more help in the
form of
additional proposed definitions--adding to the profusion of
definitions.
In recent works, Dawkins has
strongly
promoted philosopher Daniel Dennett, who uses a still less specific
definition
of meme--while neither of them even mention Cloak in
connection with
memes. Writing in his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Simon and
Schuster,
1995), Dennett treats meme theory as merely a perspective (as
distinct
from a scientific hypothesis or theoretical framework), and expresses
doubts for
the prospects that it might become a rigorous science. Dennett sums
up the
perspective he calls "the meme perspective" with the
slogan: "A scholar
is just a library's way of making another library." This slogan, the
expression
of meme theory as a perspective, and much other material were
also used
in an October 27, 1989 lecture called "Memes and the Exploitation of
the
Imagination," republished in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism
48:2, Spring 1990, p. 127-135. That journal may have been a good
place for
reviewing aesthetic or artistic perspectives, but was not a peer-
reviewed
science journal whose reviewers could be expected to have read even
popular
works on evolutionary cultural replicator theory. While the slogan
expresses the
inverted and counter-intuitive thinking that often arises in
evolutionary
cultural replicator theory, it departs radically from the
clarification of the
term "meme" given by Dawkins in 1982. Dennett also treats artifacts
such as
spoked wheels as being or containing memes. In going along with this
usage and
publicly endorsing it, Dawkins implicitly abandons his 1982
definition again in
favor of a far less specific and more ambiguous definition for which
the
prospects of rigorous science may indeed be doubtful. A pithy slogan
thus seems
to have played a larger role in the definition change than any
theoretical or
empirical developments of science. In contrast Dawkins, whose
professional
interests lie more heavily in genetics, has not promoted any work
that treats
genetics as a mere perspective. For instance, it seems unlikely that
he would
endorse a change of definition for the word gene even if
someone
popularized the provocative slogan, "An amino acid is just a prion's
way of
making another prion."
As a
reader of draft chapters from Dennett's 1995 book, Dawkins might have
persuaded
Dennett to recognize Cloak as originator and elaborator of
evolutionary cultural
replicator theory, but apparently he did not. The writing style and
non-mention
of Cloak's 1973 paper by Dawkins's 1976 book can easily give readers
the
impression that the theory was invented along with the word by
Dawkins, although
Dawkins did say in his 1982 book that he did not know the human
culture
literature well enough to authoritatively contribute to it (p. 112).
Fortunately, the authoritative contribution of the theory by Cloak
did in fact
come from a human culture specialist: a cultural anthropologist. In
both his
1989 lecture and his 1995 book, Dennett includes a paragraph (1995,
p. 361)
indicating that Dawkins was describing the "extension of classical
Darwinian
theory" (to cultural replicators) as "his" [Dawkins's]
innovation -- even
though Dawkins cites Cloak's 1975 paper, which in turn refers readers
to Cloak's
more technical 1973 paper for elaboration of the theory.
Misattribution of the
theory to Dawkins, along with Dawkins's subsequent promotion
and
endorsement of works containing that misattribution, have helped to
widely
disseminate the misattribution. Having Dawkins incorrectly credited
with
launching evolutionary cultural replicator theory may have vastly
increased the
weight given to his implied approval of a nonscientifically-based
drastic change
in the definition of the word "meme." It may also have fostered a
wide
misconception that evolutionary cultural replicator theory sprang
from "offhand
remarks" appended to a work of genetics popularization rather than
from more
serious and dedicated efforts. Further discussion of some of these
problems
appears in section
1 and the first two footnotes of an otherwise very technical
paper called
"Units, Events, and Dynamics in the Evolutionary Epidemiology of
Ideas." The
online version of Cloak's 1973
paper also
has a short foreword discussing some history of Cloak's early
papers.
In 1997, The Oxford
English
Dictionary apparently took note of both the early profusion of
definitions
and the recent shifting of definitions to come up with a very broad
definition
for meme. By that usage, some thought contagions are "memes," some
thought
contagions are not memes; some "memes" are thought contagions, and
some "memes"
are not thought contagions.
With
sharp differences between different dictionaries and
among "memeticists,"
meme has gone from its early specificity to a word
looking for a
definition--and a retinue of derivatives that seem to have been
created mainly
because they could be created. Although the word was coined to
popularize a
specific theoretical paradigm, that fact seems to have been forgotten
as people
eventually began devising theoretical paradigms to go with the word
rather than
words to go with their theoretical paradigms--perhaps due to the
word's
versatility and popularity. (Word versatility and popularity are, of
course, not
scientific criteria for forming and testing theoretical frameworks.)
This
situation may give the false impression that the word and its
similarity to the
word gene were the impetus for the original theoretical
paradigm. It also
creates a state of academic, scientific, and terminological gridlock
that may
impede application of the original theoretical framework, thus
serving various
interest groups including those who want only alternative theoretical
frameworks
(strict sociobiology, hard-line behaviorism, etc.) to be used. These
difficulties favor the use of more specific, self-explanatory, and
unequivocal
terms such as "idea," "belief," "behavior," "artifact," "thought
contagion,"
"doctrine," "opinion," "belief system," "urban legend," and so forth--
some of
which are widely accepted even without the versatility of a
monosyllable. The
difficulties with meme starting in the 1990s call for new
caution against
confusing thought contagion theory with various theories of "memes."
Accordingly, some very recent works avoid the confusion by not even
using the
word "meme" -- except in reference to literature that does use the
word.
However, the ambiguity of a word with many definitions swirling
around it can
actually increase its popular propagation, even as some scientists
recoil from
it. When people are able to read into a word the meaning that most
suits them,
it may increase the number of non-specialists adopting and using the
term.
If evolutionary cultural replicator theory isn't a perspective, then what is it? It is a mode of causal analysis. Specifically, it is the analysis of recursive chains of causation in which differences in the rates (of recursion or iteration) for communication and retention events are analyzed for their cumulative effects over many iterations at the level of a whole society. The theoretical framework does not refer to any "replicator's eye view," to "selfishness" of replicators, or require that replicators be viewed as life forms. While these concepts may serve as pedagogic devices in non-technical writing and popularization, (or even some technical works), they are not necessary parts of the theoretical framework. The theory also does not require inherently discrete "units," "components," or "particles" of culture, but allows for "units" as definable as a meter, an inch, etc are in the measurement of distance. Current theory (e.g., 2001) can explain in mathematical language why cultural items that seem "smallish" may be more useful in the analysis even though absolute metrics for the "size" of an idea, etc. are not defined. The theoretical framework also explains how the spread or decline of existing varieties can cause the arrival or extinction of new forms and combinations of ideas, beliefs, etc.
New Scientist Best Seller! |
How Belief Spreads Through Society |
Bookstores such as Borders (philosophy section), Barnes and Noble (cognitive science section), Amazon, and comprehensive independents have paperback copies available in Science, Cognitive Science, and possibly Psychology, Sociology, Cultural Studies, or Social Science sections. You may have to ask your bookseller where to find it in your local store. On-line ordering of the Hardcover edition is also available. Thought Contagion is also available as a print on demand title in stores that have this new technology.
Shopping advice: Thought Contagion deals with many important and "emotionally loaded" subjects. As a result, readers often love it or hate it, a fact that washes out as "three stars out of five" in the online ratings. If you want to be sure that this book is for you before buying it, a brick and mortar store or a library may help. A few of those who have had an emotionally hostile reaction to Thought Contagion have made false statements about the book, and these are hard to check in an online bookstore. Some online bookstores also make sales pitches for "mind virus" material and "Auctions and zShops" material--items not as related to Thought Contagion as they may seem. Selling multiple items that look superficially similar makes good business sense. Disclosure: The stock of an online bookstore is discussed in the article Thought Contagions in the Stock Market (see below). Books on "memes" and "memetics" are also often not as related as they seem, due to the profusion of definitions for the word "meme."
EARLY PRAISE FOR THOUGHT CONTAGION
"One of the most important new ideas of our times is
that of
'memes,'--the vision of ideas as autonomous entities, leaping from
brain to
brain in much the same way that viruses leap from body to body,
spreading and
replicating and 'infecting' the population of 'hosts.' This catchy
metaphor has
become increasingly powerful and deep, and Aaron Lynch's book is in
the vanguard
of efforts to clarify it and make it vivid for lay audiences. The
very meme of
'memes' is thus taking hold and spreading through the human
ideosphere, and it
is my hope that Thought Contagion will be a primary
vector in this
global epidemic. Luckily for us potential hosts, it is both benign
and
fascinating."
--DOUGLAS R.
HOFSTADTER*
"When I get down to writing The Selfish
Meme,
Aaron Lynch's admirable Thought Contagion will
undoubtedly be a
prime source book for intriguing examples and penetrating
analyses."
--RICHARD DAWKINS
"Memetics is a radical science, modeled on genetics,
that cuts
against the grain of conventional and habitual thinking; Lynch does a
fine job
of covering its pros and cons, exploring its range and making it
accessible to
nonexpert readers."
--PUBLISHERS
WEEKLY
"The book is intriguing, and its ideas are sure to
spread."
--THE
WASHINGTON POST
*Also from Doug Hofstadter: "The most thorough-going
research
on the topic of pure memetics I have yet run across is that of Aaron
Lynch..."
--Last paragraph of the Viral
Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures chaper of his book
Metamagical
Themas. (The book that contains his collected
Scientific
American columns.)
BRIEF CONTENTS & nbsp; ; &nb sp; Detailed Table of Contents also available.
Chapter 1: Self-Sent Messages and Mass Belief ............................... 1
Chapter 2: A Missing Link: Memetics and the Social Sciences ................ 17
Chapter 3: Family Plans: Ideas that Win with Children ...................... 41
Chapter 4: Sexually Transmitted Belief: The Clash of Freedom and Restriction 73
Chapter 5: Successful Cults: Western Religion by Natural Selection ......... 97
Chapter 6: Prescription Beliefs: Thought Contagions and Health ............ 135
Chapter 7: Controversy: Thought Contagions in Conflict..................... 157
Epilogue: Thought Contagions of "Thought Contagion"........................ 175
Bibliography .............................................................. 179
Index ..................................................................... 183
Free Email Newsletter: To receive occasional news of articles, books, and other developments in thought contagion research, subscribe to the free newsletter, Thought Contagion News. To sign up, send email to aaron@thoughtcontagion.com with the subject line "subscribe," or simply click here and then send the message. (Because this newsletter is infrequent, full automation has not been set up. Confirmation comes when you receive the next issue. This newsletter was previously called Mnemon.)
Archive of past issues:
Mnemon 1998a: Y2K Memes: Announces the Y2K article and other articles. October, 1998.
Mnemon 1999a: Selected Article’s, Humor, Math & thoughtcontagion.com: November, 1999.
Thought
Contagion News 2000a: Old Works, New Works, and Terminology:
December,
2000.
Note: Applied Science Works and Commercially Useful
Works of
Thought Contagion Science are not Named or Donated by Web
(Or even
written up on a computer connected to the Internet.)
Technical Literature For Scientists: See the article Units, Events, and Dynamics in the Evolutionary Epidemiology of Ideas. The paper contains rigorous definitions, symbolic analysis, (optional) mathematical equations, empirical methods, proposed animal experiments, etc. Expressing the theory in these terms shows that it is not tautological or circular. Also, while Thought Contagion uses several kinds of metaphor to explain the theory more readably, this paper shows that evolutionary epidemiology of memory items is not inherently metaphoric. (Likewise, early biological evolution theory was not inherently based on metaphors to the cultural practice of inheritance.) The paper includes explicit criteria for determining which of our ideas are thought contagions and which are not. The equations belong to a class not found in other fields (systems of non-linear, partial differentio- integral difference equations), demonstrating the non metaphoric status of this theoretical paradigm. The equations also apply to rapid changes such as rumors, gradual changes such as the spread of traditional religious faiths in modern countries, and all gradations in between. Contains a novel explanation of creativity as a population phenomenon, explaining why there are so many "virtual ties" in the arrival similar innovations by widely separated individuals. Also discusses the differences between macro-contagion and micro- contagion. Important note: The first two sections of this paper, along with the first two footnotes, are non-technical and important to scholars and many general readers.
1973 Technical Paper by F. T. Cloak: "Elementary Self- Replicating Instructions and Their Works: Toward a Radical Reconstruction of General Anthropology Through a General Theory of Natural Selection." This is a scanned version of the paper Cloak presented to the Ninth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. It is possibly the first full-fledged work of evolutionary neurally-stored cultural replicator theory, especially as expressed in technical terms; and is also the basis for various popular works. Contains event diagrams and detailed discussion of causal logic for the natural selection of neurally stored "instructions" as well as genetic "instructions." (The term "instruction" is used in an extremely generalized sense.)
Behavioral Finance Papers: "Thought Contagions In the Stock Market" a academic article in the journal Journal of Psychology and Financial Markets Volume 1, number 1, published March 24, 2000 (Paper received August 20, 1999. Final copy editing accepted January 24, 2000. Paper also presented December 11, 1999 at the meeting of the Institute for Psychology and Financial Markets at the Aspen Institute, Aspen, Colorado.). This is a print article analyzing bubbles, crashes, and other market inefficiencies. Explained the Internet dot-com bubble and forecasted its decline, providing advance details that later proved correct. A separate academic article that expands on the first and discusses some applications in general terms is published as "Thought contagion in the stock markets: A general framework and focus on the Internet bubble," in Derivatives Use, Trading and Regulation 6:4, p. 338-362. (Other behavioral finance works not published or named here.)
Excerpts from an Academic Book Chapter: "Evolutionary Contagion in Mental Software," in Robert J. Sternberg (Psychology, Yale) and James C. Kaufman (Psychology, Yale) The Evolution of Intelligence. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Draws the distinction between intelligence as an individual phenomenon and intelligence as a population phenomenon and analyzes the effects of mass beliefs on both. Covers numerous important applications of thought contagion theory. Online excerpts available on topics of astrological dating, beliefs in "psychic powers" and "ESP", widespread ideas of women having innate partner wealth preferences, Nazism and neo-Nazism, US slavery and racism, belief in corporal punishment of children, the role of accelerating cultural evolution in rising IQ test averages, and conflicting gene-culture influences on the evolution of intelligence. Contains major updates to some topics discussed in prior works.
Diets, Obesity, and Eating Disorders: The
article Thought Contagions
and
Pathological Dieting explains the infectious spread of
pathological dieting
that causes health problems ranging from anorexia to obesity. Based
on an
interview for Glamour Magazine, this article is written at a
fairly
popular level.
.
Another
Article With Numerous New Topics: Thought Contagion and Mass
Belief. Applies thought contagion theory to stock market rumors,
the pre-war
Nazi movement (see above), body piercing, cigars, and television
violence.
Y2K Application: The Millennium
Contagion: Is your
Mental Software Year 2000 Compliant?
Applies
Thought Contagion Theory to the Y2K techno-apocalypse idea, analyzing
the spread
of secular hell-doomsday ideas, progression to multi-refutation
resistant
strains, etc. A shorter print article, "The Millennium Thought
Contagion,"
containing some new material, was also published in the
November/December 1999
issue of Skeptical
Inquirer:
Also Online: A lecture titled Memes and Mass
Delusion,
dealing with topics such as the Roswell UFO myth to conspiracy
theories, and
other topics covered in more recent works. Also, a commentary on the
1997
Heaven's Gate mass suicide, Thought
Contagion and the
Heaven's Gate Tragedy.
MEME: (pronounced 'meem') 1. A self-spreading thought, idea, attitude, belief, or other brain-stored item of learned culture. 2. (Technical usage) A memory item, or portion of an organism's neurally-stored information, whose occurrence depended critically on causation by prior occurrence of the same memory item in one or more other organisms' nervous systems.
See Units, Events, and Dynamics in Memetic Evolution and its post publication comments for more rigorous discussion of the definition and 'sameness' of memory items. See Thought Contagion for further explanation in lay terms. For all works listed on these pages, the word "meme" is expendable: it can simply be replaced with less formally defined terms such as "idea," "belief," etc. or with more formal terms such as "culturally transmitted memory item," "memory contagion," or "mnemon contagion." Thought contagion theory does not require the word.
Note that the definition given above is not the same as one recently added to the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED definition is far less specific, reading "An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation." First, the OED definition poses the problem of deciding when an idea or memory item is "an element of a culture." Additionally, it contains what many would consider redundancies that leave the definition reducible to simply "an element of a culture." Lexicographers may have arrived at that broad definition by looking for some common thread of meaning among the numerous popular uses of the word "meme," but the definition unfortunately renders the word less useful to those who wanted a term more precise and specific than simply "thought," "idea," "belief," etc. The situation raises doubts about the future use of the word in thought contagion theory.
In existing works of thought contagion theory that use the word "meme," the word does not identify any newly discovered entity. Rather, it merely takes the scientifically conservative step of giving a name to the interpersonally copied subset of brain-stored Information. This is also equivalent to the brain-stored subset of culture, even though non-brain stored cultural items such as chain letters and computer viruses can also replicate or co- replicate. The word "meme" does not create some kind of grand unification of the social sciences, nor does it seek to replace the existing social sciences. As nothing more than convenient shorthand, the term "meme" is entirely dispensable in the evolutionary epidemiology of ideas. It is used on these pages only to discuss a limited but important subclass of ideas for which evolutionary replicator analysis is distinctly useful. It also does not depend on metaphor when explained in technical language. And it definitely does not warrant the extravagant, euphoric, or mystical interpretations that some writers on the Internet and elsewhere have suggested. Every science has a pseudoscience tagging alongside, and memetics is no exception--so reader beware!
Updated Definition of the term thought contagion
In order to avoid the confusion now swirling around the word meme, the more specific term thought contagion is coming into wider use. In the book Thought Contagion, the term thought contagion was defined informally to mean any self-propagating idea. Because any idea can play at least a passive role in self-propagation by merely existing in a person's brain, a more formal, general definition 2 is also possible. Together, definitions 1 and 2 are as follows:
THOUGHT CONTAGION: 1. A self-spreading thought, idea, attitude, belief, or other brain-stored item of learned culture. 2. (Technical usage) A memory item, or portion of an individual's neurally stored information, whose causation depended critically upon prior instantiation of the same memory item in one or more other individuals.
See the paper Units, Events, and
Dynamics in
the Evolutionary Epidemiology of Ideas for an up to date
explanation of
terminology.
Much as Darwinian evolution does not usefully explain all the molecules in the early oceans, so too should thought contagion theory not be invoked to explain every social phenomenon or every thought that comes to mind. When used appropriately, it still does not explain all aspects of a phenomenon, but rather joins with existing lines of social science.
Thought contagion theory is not part of a "genetic fundamentalism" movement. It even offers an explanation of why certain sociobiological ideas can proliferate with or without scientific validity. (See chapter excerpt.)
-- Anonymous, August 11, 2001