Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of memetics in the last chapter of The Selfish Gene, published in 1976. For unclear reasons (*1), Dawkins himself never developed the theory further. Susan Blackmore, Kate Distin, Robert Aunger, and Daniel Dennett are a rare few who are further developing the theory. But despite all the mentioned being highly appreciated theoreticians of the contemporary era, memetics did not really embrace the theory of culture as it should.

In this post, I will first explain why memetics still lacks theoretical support and then sketch a bridge that could bring memetics into the mainstream of social studies.

A peculiarity of human life

To understand the importance of memes, we have to ask ourselves about what constitutes human life. Contemporary biochemistry, genetics, and evolutionary theory clearly define the first and common threat of life as a particular complex of amino acids, proteins, DNA, RNA, genes, and chromosomes involved in the equally peculiar mitosis-meiosis process. Duplication of genes in cell division and recombination of genes in reproduction represent the first indisputable cornerstone of life.

Interestingly, this first cornerstone applies equally to all living creatures, from mammals and eukaryotes to prokaryotic single-celled organisms. There are differences along the line, but at least a few of the mentioned ingredients always occur in one of the processes. Let’s call this the genetic first cornerstone of life.

But the evolution by natural selection »developed« another form of emergence that we cannot explain by genes and mitosis or meiosis: human culture. While we can trace elements of culture in other species, not just among humans, those traces lack the universality of human culture. If a beaver dam is a clear example of an extended phenotype that rests on its genotype, humans’ cultural phenotypes (artefacts) have cleaved themselves from direct dependence on genes and live independently.

Anchoring

Let me clarify this distinction a bit further. While beaver dams as extended phenotypes represent a sort of beaver culture, they do not evolve. Human artefacts, music, language, and so forth, on the contrary, evolve on their own (*2). Beaver dams stay linked solely to beaver genes (genotype-phenotype connection) while human artefacts link not only to human genotype but also link as much or even more among themselves. Music from the past influences future music long after the phenotype of the original composer has already decomposed.

This conclusion leads us to the next one, which is even more critical. Since human cultural artefacts are not influenced solely by genes, and are not anchored to genes, they float around and »interbreed« much faster. A gene, namely, changes (mutates) very reluctantly. Extremely sophisticated repairing machinery in each cell prevents mutations from affecting genetic inheritance (information) from changing rapidly. All that is linked solely to genes, like human bodies, changes extremely slowly over time. Human cultural artefacts that emerge from memetic fields (*3) change/evolve extremely rapidly, though. Such rapid evolution occurs due to their linkage to one another. A slight mutation of each meme changes all the others linked to it. So in culture, we experience effects as if human body traits were directly heritable by offspring. Genes anchor our bodies, while cultural artifacts tie memes much more loosely.

The Library of Babel

So far, my explanation has been relatively straightforward and nothing really new. And I guess that it is this, at first sight, anarchic nature of human culture that scared away theoreticians from exploring memetics. Already strictly digital genes, constructed on digital DNA with only four bases (A, C, G, and T) form 8,4 million different assortments out of 23 homologous pairs of chromosomes. A vast number, but still manageable by geneticists. But the number of assortments of cultural elements should be vast, like the library of Babel.

And from here, my first point emerges: Because the number of cultural elements is so vast, theoreticians avoided even considering that cultural elements could be digital. It would be impossible to make sense of such a library, as shown in the Library of Babel application. Thus, they forgot memes as second replicators and stayed by the good old analogue school, best represented by Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson’s book The Origin and Evolution of Cultures (2005). Thus, mainstream cultural studies still behave like children who hope a problem disappears if one turns away from it.

Cultural Network Analysis

Let me now propose a path towards memes as a digitally explainable pandan to genes and memotypes as cultural artefacts that form the body of human culture.

First of all, we have to consider that memes cannot follow Mendelian laws based on dominant and recessive alleles of a gene, and then, further, on the X and Y chromosomes discovered by Thomas Hunt Morgan around 1915. A path from genes to genotypes can be traced bottom-up with all necessary details and pictured by Punnet squares to make it short. On the other hand, the assembly, combination, and recombination of memes could be described by a quite different mental tool that has been in use for quite a long time. Cultural Network Analysis (CNA)

I thus propose a known tool for application to memetics. Each node represents a meme or a memetic field (M9–M12) that connects to other memes. Each meme’s circle size represents its reproductive power, described by three known parameters: fidelity, fecundity, and logeivity.

Memes in relation to the environment

If we accept such a memetic concept, an important question arises.

The above picture gets more complicated if we take into account that memes need a substrate to live on, the human brain. Like genetic information needs an amino acid structure to exist, so do memes need brains. And, as brains are a substrate, we have to consider that they are partly genetically hard-wired and partly soft-wired. Plasticity of the brain rests not only on its physiology but also on the constant recombination of neurons’ interconnections caused by external stimuli and perception. Brains thus exist only as related to the outside world. Brains cannot exist on themselves, as brains in a vat.

With their brains, memes also exist in relation to external and internal stimuli, later being memes themselves. This is partly an argument for a proposed Cultural Network Analysis representation of memetic structures and another essential feature of how memes interact. The above hypothetical picture of a CNA might appear in the same form in two individuals. Still, the phenotypic effect would be different, depending on the particular context in which those two separate brains live.

Thus, I have answered that the above CNA picture is the picture of a memetic field (*4) and that one such memetic field necessarily produces different artefacts. This is why we say that the poem happens not in the book but as the interaction between words and a particular individual. That is why we know that each of us creates a particular subjective material meme from the same picture  (artifact). The visual stimuli in a picture trigger the emergence of a specific memetic field (a bond between material and strategic memes) in our brains, dependent on the stimuli and our personal context.

The holism of memes

This brings us to yet another peculiarity of memetics. It cannot be but holistic. I mean that, unlike the story of genotype and phenotype, which can be described bottom-up, memetics asks for a top-down explanation. It is a context in memetics, an intersubjective context, may I add, that makes sense out of specific memetic fields. Sense (consciousness) does not come from the bottom up, but from the top down. The sense is holistic.

And that is why memetics is such a strange field to theoreticians steeped in reductionism. The sense is dual. Partly it is hard-wired and reducible, but partly it also comes a priori. We know before we can explain why we know. We react faster than we know because we are hard-wired, but we know before we understand because memes’ hierarchy goes top-down, from more abstract to more particular. The memetic world is partly deductive but at the same time entirely inductive. Thus, we could say that memes are, at the same time, digital units that behave analogically (holistically) (*5).

Power law as an underlying principle

And lastly, let me explain the laws behind the combination and recombination of memes. Their lives and reproduction cannot be described by meiosis or mitosis, but by the power law. Memes reproduce and get stronger according to the power law. That is why only a few get almost all of the attention, while the larger majority vanish in almost absolute anonymity. The COVID pandemic is an example of a contemporary, extremely powerful meme-complex that recently overshadowed the overwhelmingly powerful climate change meme-complex. For instance, the tobacco-health meme-complex fades away. According to the power law, only a few memes dominate during a given period. Other examples of CNA also show that all networks follow power-law rules.

Memes’ identity, a quest

The last point to make is about the identity of a meme. Memes are the smallest elements of a sensemaking activity. Describing the structure of memes requires profound further elaboration (*6). Imagine the structure of genes; from base pairs, nucleotides, codons, alleles to chromosomes leads a path that is not always simple and is even less straightforward. It will take some time to define different verbal, pictural, musical, technical, and perhaps even some other types of memes. As it was a long way from Georg Mendel to Francis Crick, we should not expect memetics to evolve overnight.

And this concludes our brief exploration of why memetics is not widely accepted and what its theoretical foundation could be in the future. This sketch needs further elaboration. Many questions about the mechanisms behind are left open. But what I hope I have achieved is to picture the field in which such elaboration should occur. A top-down approach, CNA, power laws, and intersubjectivity constrain this field.

Footnotes:

(*1) As I have discovered in Memes Beyond Genes, the reason why memetic research stalled lies in the reluctance of the above-mentioned memeticists to explore the ontology of memes. I’ve proposed one answer not only to the question of the “materiality” of memes but also how to detect them, and with that, how to prove or disprove my theory.

(*2) Five years ago, I was unaware of the peculiar topology of memes and the distinction between strategic and material memes and their artifacts as emergencies. Important as this distinction is, it does not influence the narrative of this post, so I should upgrade it.

(*3) Since Susan Blackmore does not distinguish memes from artifacts and explicitly did not address the ontology of memes, she introduced the concept of memotype, which at the same time describes both the collection of memes and a memetic artifact. If memes are quantum-like entities with quantum-field properties, a memetic field is a much better explanation for them, while artifacts are memes “embodied,” like phenotypes are genes “embodied”. Please note that “embodiment here is a highly vague analogy.

(*4) Susan would use “memetic complex” here. 

(*5) At this point, it is seen that already five years ago, I (still subconsciously) understood memes in wave-particle duality, as quantum-like objects.

(*6) Memes Beyond Genes