A meme consists of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or
idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to
another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits,
songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity.
Memes propagate themselves and can move through a "culture" in a manner
similar to the behavior of a virus. As a unit of cultural evolution, a meme
in some ways resembles a gene. Richard Dawkins, in his book, The Selfish
Gene, recounts how and why he coined the term meme to describe how one might
extend Darwinian principles to explain the spread of ideas and cultural
phenomena. He gave as examples tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs,
clothing-fashions, and the technology of building arches.

There are no such things as memes. Memes are invented as a attempt to
reduce intellectual debate to a simple mechanistic process which
ignores human agency.
Explanations which seek reductionist explanations from "pure" science
ignore the fundamental difficulties inherent in social sciences and
humanities subjects, and are always unsatisfying. It's like trying to
explain how you feel about your loved ones by measuring the amount of
hormone in your blood; or trying to explain the Mona Lisa by the
chemical composition of the paints used by the artist.
The sort of mechanism its proponents seek to demonstrate is the spread
of religion, or the growth of an idea. They are forced to make a
judgment as to "why" these things persist and reproduce but all they
really have is a "how".
Whether these "memes"...

On Tue, 13 May 2008 00:54:15 -0700, chazwin wrote:

The only answer to this I see is one of different prospective. Taken
literally this does rank right down there with the viewpoint of "human as
brain, brain as computer".

The tendency seems to be to fit all of everything into the excitement of
the day. Here it is genetics. Soon, I suspect, nano-speak will make an
appearance. If there is a real answer to "so what", I think it is here.

"ZerkonX" X.net> wrote in message news:pan.2008.05.13.12.03.36@X.net...

indeed. both pretty meaningless replies.

we're like droplets of meme pooling together to form ponds of story:

On May 14, 6:34 am, "turtoni" fastmail.net> wrote:

Try reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

Lot's of answers to your "so fucking what?"

"In response to these criticisms, memeticists might argue that as their
discipline does not construe memes as "particulate" entities, they therefore
parallel indirectly the entirety of existing evolutionary...

On Wed, 14 May 2008 14:00:11 -0400, turtoni wrote:

But the physicality is itself a difficulty. The mechanics of the word/
sound does not in the least account for meaning even taking the sound/
word into the neural process of cognition. All available senses must be
factored. Context must be factored and finally, the worst of it, all that
is not part of, what is called, the conscious level crudely called the
sub-conscious.

For instance the general area of non-verbal communication is still, by in
large, a behavioral black hole as it were even though it carries much
more information than the verbal aspect of any given exchange. In USENET-
LAND, clicking on a post before one word is read, the format of the
message speaks.

For me, the meme idea is interesting but outside of analogy it fails.

On 14 May, 19:00, "turtoni" fastmail.net> wrote: