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Memetics
Memetics is a theory of the evolution of culture based on Darwinian principles with the meme as the unit of culture. The term "meme" was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book '' The Selfish Gene'', to illustrate the principle that he later called " Universal Darwinism". All evolutionary processes depend on information being copied, varied, and selected, a process also known as variation with selective retention. The conveyor of the information being copied is known as the replicator, with the gene functioning as the replicator in biological evolution. Dawkins proposed that the same process drives cultural evolution, and he called this second replicator the "meme," citing examples such as musical tunes, catchphrases, fashions, and technologies. Like genes, memes are selfish replicators and have causal efficacy; in other words, their properties influence their chances of being copied and passed on. Some succeed because they are valuable or useful to their human hosts ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Meme
A meme (; ) is an idea, behavior, or style that Mimesis, spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying culture, cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they Self-replication, self-replicate, mutate, and respond to natural selection, selective pressures. In popular language, a meme may refer to an Internet meme, typically an image, that is remixed, copied, and circulated in a shared cultural experience online. Proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of evolution, biological evolution. Memes do this through processes analogous to those of genetic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Susan Blackmore
Susan Jane Blackmore (born 29 July 1951) is a British writer, lecturer, sceptic, broadcaster, and a visiting professor at the University of Plymouth. Her fields of research include memetics, parapsychology, consciousness, and she is best known for her book '' The Meme Machine''. She has written or contributed to over 40 books and 60 scholarly articles and is a contributor to ''The Guardian'' newspaper. Career In 1973, Susan Blackmore graduated from St Hilda's College, Oxford, with a BA (Hons) degree in psychology and physiology. She received an MSc in environmental psychology in 1974 from the University of Surrey. In 1980, she earned a PhD in parapsychology from the same university; her doctoral thesis was titled "Extrasensory Perception as a Cognitive Process." In the 1980s, Blackmore conducted psychokinesis experiments to see if her baby daughter, Emily, could influence a random number generator. The experiments were mentioned in the book to accompany the TV series '' Arthur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cultural Evolution
Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission". Cultural evolution is the change of this information over time. Cultural evolution, historically also known as sociocultural evolution, was originally developed in the 19th century by anthropologists stemming from Charles Darwin's research on evolution. Today, cultural evolution has become the basis for a growing field of scientific research in the social sciences, including anthropology, economics, psychology, and organizational studies. Previously, it was believed that social change resulted from biological adaptations; anthropologists now commonly accept that social changes arise in consequence of a combination of social, environmental, and biological influences (viewed from a nature vs nurture ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Selfish Gene
''The Selfish Gene'' is a 1976 book on evolution by ethologist Richard Dawkins that promotes the gene-centred view of evolution, as opposed to views focused on the organism and the group. The book builds upon the thesis of George C. Williams's '' Adaptation and Natural Selection'' (1966); it also popularized ideas developed during the 1960s by W. D. Hamilton and others. From the gene-centred view, it follows that the more two individuals are genetically related, the more sense (at the level of the genes) it makes for them to behave cooperatively with each other. A lineage is expected to evolve to maximise its inclusive fitness—the number of copies of its genes passed on globally (rather than by a particular individual). As a result, populations will tend towards an evolutionarily stable strategy. The book also introduces the term ''meme'' for a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene, suggesting that such "selfish" replication may also model human cult ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett III (March 28, 1942 – April 19, 2024) was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. His research centered on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. Dennett was the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Dennett was a member of the editorial board for ''The Rutherford Journal'' and a co-founder of The Clergy Project. A vocal atheist and secularist, Dennett has been described as "one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers". He was referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Early life and education Daniel Clement Dennett III was born on March 28, 1942, in Boston, Boston, Massachusetts, the son of R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Meme Machine
''The Meme Machine'' is a popular science book by Susan Blackmore on the subject of memes. Blackmore attempts to constitute memetics as a science by discussing its empirical and analytic potential, as well as some important problems with memetics. The first half of the book tries to create greater clarity about the definition of the meme as she sees it. The last half of the book consists of a number of possible memetic explanations for such different problems as the origin of language, the origin of the human brain, sexual phenomena, the Internet and the notion of the self. These explanations, in her view, give simpler and clearer explanations than trying to create genetic explanations in these fields. The idea of memes, and the word itself, were originally speculated by Richard Dawkins in his book ''The Selfish Gene'' although similar, or analogous, concepts had been in currency for a while before its publishing. Richard Dawkins wrote a foreword to ''The Meme Machine''. In t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Viruses Of The Mind
"Viruses of the Mind" is an essay by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, first published in the book ''Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind'' (1993). Dawkins originally wrote the essay in 1991 and delivered it as a Voltaire Lecture on 6 November 1992 at the Conway Hall Humanist Centre. The essay discusses how religion can be viewed as a meme - an idea which Dawkins had previously expressed in ''The Selfish Gene'' (1976). Dawkins analyzes the propagation of religious ideas and behaviors as a memetic virus, analogous to how biological and computer viruses spread. The essay was later published in '' A Devil's Chaplain'' (2003), and its ideas are further explored in Dawkins's documentary television programme '' The Root of All Evil?'' (2006). Content Dawkins lists possible "symptoms" of infection with a "mind-virus" such as religion, providing examples for most of them, and tries to define a connection between the elements of religion and the religion's surviva ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Universal Darwinism
Universal Darwinism, also known as generalized Darwinism, universal selection theory, or Darwinian metaphysics, is a variety of approaches that extend the theory of Darwinism beyond its original domain of biological evolution on Earth. Universal Darwinism aims to formulate a generalized version of the mechanisms of variation, selection and heredity proposed by Charles Darwin, so that they can apply to explain evolution in a wide variety of other domains, including psychology, linguistics, economics, culture, medicine, computer science, and physics. Basic mechanisms At the most fundamental level, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution states that organisms evolve and adapt to their environment by an iterative process. This process can be conceived as an evolutionary algorithm that searches the space of possible forms (the fitness landscape) for the ones that are best adapted. The process has three components: * variation of a given form or template. This is usually (but no ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dan Sperber
Dan Sperber (born 20 June 1942 in Cagnes-sur-Mer) is a French social and cognitive scientist, anthropologist and philosopher. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, psychology of reasoning, and philosophy of the social sciences. He has developed: an approach to cultural evolution known as the epidemiology of representations or cultural attraction theory as part of a naturalistic reconceptualization of the social; (with British philosopher and linguist Deirdre Wilson) relevance theory; (with French psychologist Hugo Mercier) the argumentative theory of reasoning. Sperber formerly ''Directeur de Recherche'' at the ''Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique'' is Professor in the Departments of Cognitive Science and of Philosophy at the Central European University in Budapest. Background Sperber is the son of Austrian-French novelist Manès Sperber. He was born in France and raised an atheist but his parents, b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould ( ; September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American Paleontology, paleontologist, Evolutionary biology, evolutionary biologist, and History of science, historian of science. He was one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996, Gould was hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, after which he divided his time teaching between there and Harvard. Gould's most significant contribution to evolutionary biology was the theory of punctuated equilibrium developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972.Eldredge, Niles, and S. J. Gould (1972)"Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism."In T.J.M. Schopf, ed., ''Models in Paleobiology''. San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper and Company, pp. 82–115. The theory proposes that most evolution is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) is a British evolutionary biology, evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator and author. He is an Oxford fellow, emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, Professor for Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008, and is on the advisory board of the University of Austin. His book ''The Selfish Gene'' (1976) popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and coined the word ''meme''. Dawkins has won several academic and writing awards. A vocal Atheism, atheist, Dawkins is known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. He wrote ''The Blind Watchmaker'' (1986), in which he argues against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a creator deity based upon the Evolution of biological complexity, complexity of living organisms. Instead, he describes evolutionary processes as analogous to a ''blind'' watc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
