Chandler, Daniel & Rod Munday. 2011. A dictionary of communication. Oxford: Oxford Reference. 10.1093/acref/9780199568758.001.0001 Search in Google Scholar Some commentators have likened the transmission of memes to the spread of contagions. [38] Social contagions such as fads, hysteria, copycat crime, and copycat suicide exemplify memes seen as the contagious imitation of ideas. 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. [39] The particular meme discussed in the interview is believed my many to be the first meme, in the modern sense of the word. But it's interesting to note that, as with most other instances of the word in use for years to come, the example was seen as simply an iteration of the existing meaning. But as all this meme use was going on, a new use was bubbling up—the one that in more recent years has become the dominant one. The first instance of this use that we were able to find in the Nexis database of thousands of mostly news publications is a 1998 interview on CNN: Graffiti have been the elemental memes of political speech, from the walls of Pompeii to the New York subways to the Berlin Wall, in all the oppressed countries of this world.

Keywords: Behavioural Contagion; Coevolution; Emotional Contagion; Evolution; Imitation; Meme; Memetics; Selectionism; Social Contagion; Social Learning Labov, William. 1986. The social stratification of (r) in New York City. In Michael D. Harold & Byron Allen (eds.), Dialect and language variation, 304–329. London: Academic Press https://doi.org/10.1016/B978–0-12–051130–3.50029-X. 10.1016/B978-0-12-051130-3.50029-X Search in Google Scholar

The Selfish Gene

Hull, David L. (2001). "Taking memetics seriously: Memetics will be what we make it". In Aunger, Robert (ed.). Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science (1sted.). Oxford University Press. pp.43–67. ISBN 9780192632449. Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.”- Erich Fromm Quotes about selfishness can offer insight into the consequences of this behavior and provide guidance on how to deal with it. Best Selfish Friends and Mean People Quotes Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator. He hypothesized that one could view many cultural entities as replicators, and pointed to melodies, fashions and learned skills as examples. Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behavior. Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time. Dawkins likened the process by which memes survive and change through the evolution of culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution. [21] This dictionary defines Dawkins' sense of meme as "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture." The word wasn't entered until 1998, when it earned a spot in an update of the Tenth Edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary. Although Dawkins had coined the word in a 1976 book, it was more than 20 years before the accumulation of examples of the word in use demonstrated that it was a fully established term in the language. Here's the kind of evidence that paved the way for the word's dictionary debut:

Graham, Gordon (2002). Genes: A Philosophical Inquiry. New York: Routledge. p.196. ISBN 9780415252577. According to the author, the solution is to be found in the theory of mental content: mental content is cultural DNA. On her view, while the best way of identifying genes is in terms of DNA sequences, the best way of identifying memes is in terms of mental contents. As a consequence, the theory of mental content can advance our understanding of cultural evolution in the same way that the theory of DNA has advanced our understanding of genetic evolution. In The Selfish Gene Dawkins (1976) popularised the gene’s eye view of biological evolution. Yet, rather than confining his argument to selfish genes, Dawkins wanted to emphasise what he called ‘universal Darwinism’. This is the general principle that whenever information is copied with variation and selection, then evolution is inevitable. Campbell (1960) describes the same process as “blind variation with selective retention”. Dawkins distinguished between the information that is copied (the replicator), and the carrier of that information (the vehicle). This is similar to Hull’s (1988) distinction between replicators and interactors. In the case of biology, genes are replicators and their phenotypes are their vehicles or interactors. Animals, in Dawkins’ view, are the ‘lumbering robots’ that carry their replicators around and protect them. The term meme is a shortening (modeled on gene) of mimeme, which comes from Ancient Greek mīmēma ( μίμημα; pronounced [míːmɛːma]), meaning 'imitated thing', itself from mimeisthai ( μιμεῖσθαι, 'to imitate'), from mimos ( μῖμος, 'mime'). [17] [18] [19] Meme isn't new: it dates to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene, where it functioned with a meaning other than its current most common one. In Dawkins' conception of the term, it is "a unit of cultural transmission"—the cultural equivalent of a gene:meme". Oxford Dictionaries. Archived from the original on 23 May 2019 . Retrieved 30 December 2017. Heylighen, Francis. "Meme replication: The memetic life-cycle". Principia Cybernetica. Archived from the original on 4 October 2018 . Retrieved 26 July 2013. Memes are, simply put, ideas that catch on. This book is, not so simply, a collection of memes in essay form …, written by self-proclaimed off-planet journalist Rheingold. A selfish person is someone who is primarily concerned with their own needs and desires, often at the expense of others.

Principal criticisms of memetics include the claim that memetics ignores established advances in other fields of cultural study, such as sociology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, and social psychology. Questions remain whether or not the meme concept counts as a validly disprovable scientific theory. This view regards memetics as a theory in its infancy: a protoscience to proponents, or a pseudoscience to some detractors. [54] Criticism of meme theory In contemporary biological terminology, when a gene "out-reproduces" other genes (and thereby increases in frequency) because it has some properties that (in its environment) make the gene more likely to be copied (and to be represented in future generations), the gene is said to have increased in frequency because of Darwinian selection. This terminology is the result of an elaboration in statistical language of the ideas that Charles Darwin first presented in The Origin of Species . Dawkins's suggestion in The Selfish Gene was that the same kind of selectionist thinking that biologists apply to biological change might be fruitfully applied to cultural change. He made this suggestion again in The Extended Phenotype , but with the addition of some important caveats. Dawkins, Richard. 2016. The selfish gene: Fortieth anniversary edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Search in Google Scholar

At first blush, the notion that the self-disclosure impulse is somehow good for the species might seem counterintuitive. If all we did was prattle on about ourselves, we’d soon bore one another to extinction. Why would we have evolved to get a rush of pleasure from hearing ourselves talk? What the study really illustrated, then, was a paradox: when it comes to information, sharing is mostly about me. The researchers weren’t trying to answer the thornier question of why—why, as they wrote, our species might have “an intrinsic drive to disclose thoughts to others.” The paper nonetheless points to an intriguing possibility: that this drive might give us humans an adaptive advantage. Genes may be replicators but they are only one example. In Dawkins’ opinion, life anywhere in the universe would be driven by some kind of replicator, whether based on chemistry, electronic circuitry or anything else. This is why he asked, ‘do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicator and other, consequent, kinds of evolution?’ and answered, ‘no’. Staring us in the face is a second replicator, ‘It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup … the soup of human culture’ He wanted a name to convey the sense of a unit of imitation, and one that would rhyme with ‘gene’. Taking, mimeme from the Greek meaning ‘imitated thing’ or ‘that which is imitated’, he chose the word ‘meme’. Examples are ‘tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches’ (Dawkins 1976 p 192). We might add to his list, stories, poems, works of art, money, financial institutions, scientific theories, and much more. All these are copied from person to person with variation and selection; they fit the definition of a meme as replicator. In this way memetics echoes much earlier ideas, and indeed versions of universal Darwinism have a long history (Plotkin 1993, Campbell 2011). Boyd, R. and Richerson, P. 2005. The Origin and Evolution of Cultures . Oxford University Press, Oxford. Stein, Gertrude. 1922. Sacred Emily. Geography and plays. https://www.lettersofnote.com/p/sacred-emily-by-gertrude-stein.html (accessed 21 March 2019). Search in Google Scholar

Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness.” – Napoleon HillPeirce, Charles Sanders 1931–1966. The collected papers of Charles S. Peirce 8 vols. C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss & A. W. Burks (eds.), Cambridge: Harvard University press. [Reference to Peirce’s papers will be designated CP followed by volume and paragraph number]. Search in Google Scholar Wilkins, John S. (1998). "What's in a Meme? Reflections from the perspective of the history and philosophy of evolutionary biology". Journal of Memetics. 2. Archived from the original on 1 December 2009 . Retrieved 13 December 2008.