The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment

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Atran gets his hands dirty and does real social science experiments and adjusts his theories accordingly. Bodies are built by cells reading the instructions in the DNA Instruction Set, but this is not the equivelant of words instructing brains to construct communication of ideas.

A selfish person is someone who is primarily concerned with their own needs and desires, often at the expense of others. The reuse of the neural space hosting a certain meme's copy to host different memes is the greatest threat to that meme's copy. 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').In essence every change produced in the next generation may have a cost and a benefit – or be neutral – to those individuals that have that change, and their genes. Although religious memes have proliferated in human cultures, the modern scientific community has been relatively resistant to religious belief. Daniel Dennett put it best when he pointed out that, if a ratio between mutation rate and reproduction rate was skewed towards the mutation rate, “good tricks would be lost as soon as they were acquired” (paraphrased slightly). Memes may also die and be replaced by other memes as did the ether which scientists had always thought existed until the end of the 19 th century.

It’s not just that natural selection will favor genes that replicate with high fidelity it’s that we wouldn’t even get natural selection if the genes didn’t replicate with a high degree of fidelity. Blackmore meets such criticism by stating that memes compare with genes in this respect: that while a gene has no particular size, nor can we ascribe every phenotypic feature directly to a particular gene, it has value because it encapsulates that key unit of inherited expression subject to evolutionary pressures. Reflections on the use of spirituality to privilege religion in scientific discourse: Incorporating considerations of self".Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths noted the cumulative evolution of genes depends on biological selection-pressures neither too great nor too small in relation to mutation-rates, while pointing out there is no reason to think that the same balance will exist in the selection pressures on memes. Some memes have an informational content or an informational format that makes them more likely (in a given social, biological, and physical environment) to be passed on. The point of the story is that I went back to school and infected my friends with the skill, and it then spread around the school with the speed of measles and pretty much the same epidemiological time course.

A meme may improve its prospects for survival if it becomes part of what Dawkins termed a “memeplex”.

A new method to make blades sharper is valuable knowledge and will either spread throughout a population, if allowed to do so, or will be guarded jealously by those who already possess that knowledge. Of course how much is “high” fidelity isn’t an exact number but if in general (I thought) genes don’t replicate with some high percentage of accuracy then there isn’t enough consistency from one organism to the next for any meaningful changes to even accrue.