mentally weak asshole who invented the word “meme”
He coined the word to mean a thought or idea that spreads through a population. Internet memes are completely unrelated to his usage. It’s not like he created the first insanity wolf meme or something.
Yes, and it is the most useless concept ever committed to text. It’s ironic it was coopted by internet culture and then ridiculed and reduced to absurdity.
He just tried to poorly rebrand the concepts of cultural imagery, and social constructs but with less evidence. It’s akin to me going “I propose the term garggle, it is water that flows down by gravity following the contours of the solid ground”. It’s like, yeah, we call it water and when it does that we call it a river, you would know if you opened a book about it anytime in the past century. You could summarize that book as “better read a book on sociology, it’s more useful”.
Nah, this is a bad take. Memes are a sociological analog to genetic genes. They’re units of cultural information that mutate, recombine, and evolve in the cultural space the same way genes mutate, recombine, and evolve in the gene pool. It’s a poignant observation about the behavior of viral cultural concepts that transcends merely describing their existence. The parallel to genetic behavior is a useful observation that, to my knowledge, was not really acknowledged before he coined the term.
It was acknowledged before he coined it. He just summed it up better than people had previously. From Wikipedia:
The idea of language as a virus had already been introduced by William S. Burroughs as early as 1962 in his novel The Ticket That Exploded, and continued in The Electronic Revolution, published in 1970 in The Job.
The foundation of memetics in its full modern incarnation was launched by Douglas Rushkoff’s Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture in 1995,[15] and was accelerated with the publication in 1996 of two more books by authors outside the academic mainstream: Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by former Microsoft executive turned motivational speaker and professional poker-player Richard Brodie, and Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society by Aaron Lynch, a mathematician and philosopher who worked for many years as an engineer at Fermilab. Lynch claimed to have conceived his theory totally independently of any contact with academics in the cultural evolutionary sphere, and apparently was not aware of The Selfish Gene until his book was very close to publication.
What Dawkins did was make the concept more analogous to a gene than a virus, but it’s basically the same idea.
The difference between a gene and a virus is method of reproduction. The genetic model, I think, is considerably more apt than the viral. Memes combine with other memes, they have memetically distinct “offspring”. I think even that distinction is useful.
I can accept there’s people who like the concept but there’s a reason it didn’t take hold anywhere except pop science and is a theoretical dead end. It has a ton of epistemological flaws that make it useless as a scientific construct. It is unfalsifiable and it provides no venues for theoretical or experimental developments. As I stated, there are far more useful constructs in sociology and social psychology that allows the analysis of social constructs, cultural imagery, beliefs, values, worldviews, etc. With over a century of epistemological, theoretical and methodological traditions that have provided useful advancements to our scientific understanding, and provided tools for further development. Memes are barely a fun simile with genes that was cool to make YouTube videos about ten years ago, but that’s about it.
Congratulations on your recency bias, then, I suppose. I guess then you have also read Graham on the philosophical definitions of genes, and Jameson about memetics and neo-Darwinism research were he categorizes several criticism from the social sciences on the concept. As well as Burman, who defends the concept but also calls it an “unscientific object”. Or the analysis on the alt-right ideological ties of neo-darwimism from Weikart. I personally find the most compelling the article from Benitez Bribiesca, for I do think memetics are a dangerous idea. But the most compelling is of course the analysis from Dennett elaborating how memes, on their own fail to explain social phenomenon that should, as proposed by Dawkins, be regarded as memes, but other forms of sociological analysis can indeed account for the entirety of the phenomenon without the need of extraneous theories. This is what I think leads Mayr to claim that the theory of memes is unnecessary and there are anthropological and sociological theories better suited to explain the phenomena of concepts. Because I have read all of those and many more, too much to list here, over the course of decades. But what am I saying, you just read Selfish gene, of course no one knows more about it than you. Dear lord, my thesis tutor was right, “for the average idiot, their ignorance is as good as your PhD, no matter how much evidence you produce”.
my thesis tutor was right, “for the average idiot, their ignorance is as good as your PhD, no matter how much evidence you produce”.
This may be true, but it’s not applicable in this conversation. Up until this comment you haven’t provided any evidence or reasoning for your beliefs. You came in here frothing at the mouth attacking everyone in sight, and when people questioned you you doubled down on the hostility and lack of reasoning backing up your points by insisting it wasn’t your job to educate people on the internet.
Maybe there’s a lesson to be learned from your aggressive replies and general belligerence. A psychologist should be able to learn something from it.
You argued it’s “the most useless idea ever committed to text”, that’s a bad take. No one claimed that it’s a rigorous scientific theory, that’s your failure to understand the premise. It’s a useful analogy, like the useful observation that electricity in a circuit behaves in many ways like water in a pipe, or that Einsteinian spacetime behaves in many ways like a rubber sheet. Are these analogies “useless” because electricity isn’t in fact water, and space-time is not in fact rubber? Or would a self-righteous PhD make themselves look supremely foolish by attacking these illustrative analogies as useless because they aren’t rigorous scientific theories?
Having read most of your sources here, they do not support your conclusion. I see opinion pieces, confessions of the authors’ personal inabilities to imagine the granularity of a singular meme, lamentations over different authors’ conflicting definition of a meme, and smug conflation of memetic behavior and the substance of consciousness, but not claims that the idea is useless. Non rigorous, over extended, inconsistently defined, sure. But useless? Much less the most useless idea ever committed to text? That is your own myopic hyperbole.
He coined the word to mean a thought or idea that spreads through a population. Internet memes are completely unrelated to his usage. It’s not like he created the first insanity wolf meme or something.
Yes, and it is the most useless concept ever committed to text. It’s ironic it was coopted by internet culture and then ridiculed and reduced to absurdity.
He just tried to poorly rebrand the concepts of cultural imagery, and social constructs but with less evidence. It’s akin to me going “I propose the term garggle, it is water that flows down by gravity following the contours of the solid ground”. It’s like, yeah, we call it water and when it does that we call it a river, you would know if you opened a book about it anytime in the past century. You could summarize that book as “better read a book on sociology, it’s more useful”.
Nah, this is a bad take. Memes are a sociological analog to genetic genes. They’re units of cultural information that mutate, recombine, and evolve in the cultural space the same way genes mutate, recombine, and evolve in the gene pool. It’s a poignant observation about the behavior of viral cultural concepts that transcends merely describing their existence. The parallel to genetic behavior is a useful observation that, to my knowledge, was not really acknowledged before he coined the term.
It was acknowledged before he coined it. He just summed it up better than people had previously. From Wikipedia:
What Dawkins did was make the concept more analogous to a gene than a virus, but it’s basically the same idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
The difference between a gene and a virus is method of reproduction. The genetic model, I think, is considerably more apt than the viral. Memes combine with other memes, they have memetically distinct “offspring”. I think even that distinction is useful.
It is useful, I agree. I’m just saying the idea was already around. He definitely refined it and improved upon it though.
Memetics in action.
Good point!
I can accept there’s people who like the concept but there’s a reason it didn’t take hold anywhere except pop science and is a theoretical dead end. It has a ton of epistemological flaws that make it useless as a scientific construct. It is unfalsifiable and it provides no venues for theoretical or experimental developments. As I stated, there are far more useful constructs in sociology and social psychology that allows the analysis of social constructs, cultural imagery, beliefs, values, worldviews, etc. With over a century of epistemological, theoretical and methodological traditions that have provided useful advancements to our scientific understanding, and provided tools for further development. Memes are barely a fun simile with genes that was cool to make YouTube videos about ten years ago, but that’s about it.
Hard disagree. I don’t think you actually understand the premise.
I don’t think you have ever read the premise beyond the cliffsnotes. But it is not my job to educate strangers on the internet.
Take the L buddy💀🙏
I read Selfish Gene, like, a few months ago.
Congratulations on your recency bias, then, I suppose. I guess then you have also read Graham on the philosophical definitions of genes, and Jameson about memetics and neo-Darwinism research were he categorizes several criticism from the social sciences on the concept. As well as Burman, who defends the concept but also calls it an “unscientific object”. Or the analysis on the alt-right ideological ties of neo-darwimism from Weikart. I personally find the most compelling the article from Benitez Bribiesca, for I do think memetics are a dangerous idea. But the most compelling is of course the analysis from Dennett elaborating how memes, on their own fail to explain social phenomenon that should, as proposed by Dawkins, be regarded as memes, but other forms of sociological analysis can indeed account for the entirety of the phenomenon without the need of extraneous theories. This is what I think leads Mayr to claim that the theory of memes is unnecessary and there are anthropological and sociological theories better suited to explain the phenomena of concepts. Because I have read all of those and many more, too much to list here, over the course of decades. But what am I saying, you just read Selfish gene, of course no one knows more about it than you. Dear lord, my thesis tutor was right, “for the average idiot, their ignorance is as good as your PhD, no matter how much evidence you produce”.
Education isn’t intelligence. Demonstrably. You’re not clever, at all.
This may be true, but it’s not applicable in this conversation. Up until this comment you haven’t provided any evidence or reasoning for your beliefs. You came in here frothing at the mouth attacking everyone in sight, and when people questioned you you doubled down on the hostility and lack of reasoning backing up your points by insisting it wasn’t your job to educate people on the internet.
Maybe there’s a lesson to be learned from your aggressive replies and general belligerence. A psychologist should be able to learn something from it.
You argued it’s “the most useless idea ever committed to text”, that’s a bad take. No one claimed that it’s a rigorous scientific theory, that’s your failure to understand the premise. It’s a useful analogy, like the useful observation that electricity in a circuit behaves in many ways like water in a pipe, or that Einsteinian spacetime behaves in many ways like a rubber sheet. Are these analogies “useless” because electricity isn’t in fact water, and space-time is not in fact rubber? Or would a self-righteous PhD make themselves look supremely foolish by attacking these illustrative analogies as useless because they aren’t rigorous scientific theories?
Having read most of your sources here, they do not support your conclusion. I see opinion pieces, confessions of the authors’ personal inabilities to imagine the granularity of a singular meme, lamentations over different authors’ conflicting definition of a meme, and smug conflation of memetic behavior and the substance of consciousness, but not claims that the idea is useless. Non rigorous, over extended, inconsistently defined, sure. But useless? Much less the most useless idea ever committed to text? That is your own myopic hyperbole.