Memetics

26Aug07

According Wikipedia, Memectis is:

“… an approach to evolutionary models of information transfer based on the concept of the meme. “

Richard Dawkins believe that meme is a unit of information residing in the brain and is the mutating replicator in human cultural evolution.

Dawkins apparently did not intend to present a comprehensive theory of memetics in The Selfish Gene, but rather coined the term meme in a speculative spirit. Accordingly, the term “unit of information” came to be defined in different ways by many scientists. The modern memetics movement dates from the mid 1980s (a January 1983 Metamagical Themas column by Douglas Hofstadter in Scientific American was influential). The study differs from mainstream cultural evolutionary theory in that its practitioners frequently come from outside the fields of anthropology and sociology, and are often not academics. The massive popular impact of Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene has undoubtedly been an important factor in drawing in people of disparate intellectual backgrounds.

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Tags: IS, meme