The modern memetics movement dates from the mid-1980s. It has been proposed that just as memes are analogous to genes, memetics is analogous to genetics. Starting from a proposition put forward in the writings of Dawkins, this model has formed the basis of a new area of study, one that looks at the self-replicating units of culture. The evolutionary model of cultural information transfer is based on the concept that memes-units of information-have an independent existence, are self-replicating, and are subject to selective evolution through environmental forces. Accordingly, different researchers came to define the term "unit of information" in different ways. 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. Dawkins himself did not provide a sufficient explanation of how the replication of units of information in the brain controls human behaviour and ultimately culture (the principal topic of the book was genetics). This proposal resulted in debate among anthropologists, sociologists, biologists, and scientists of other disciplines. A replicator is a pattern that can influence its surroundings – that is, it has causal agency – and can propagate. After Dawkins, many discussed this unit of culture as evolutionary "information" which replicates with rules analogous to Darwinian selection. While cultural evolution itself is a much older topic, with a history that dates back at least as far as Darwin's era, Dawkins (1976) proposed that the meme is a unit of culture residing in the brain and is the mutating replicator in human cultural evolution. In his book The Selfish Gene (1976), the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins used the term meme to describe a unit of human cultural transmission analogous to the gene, arguing that replication also happens in culture, albeit in a different sense. Nevertheless, contemporary memetics tends to refer to these early memetic arguments as reducible to " mentalism". Daniel Dennett went as far as to say "a meme's existence depends on a physical embodiment," rather than the other way around. However, reduction of a meme to an immaterial idea was contested during memetics' early theoretical developments. As with genetics, particularly under a Dawkinsian interpretation, a meme's success may be due to its contribution to the effectiveness of its host. Thus what would otherwise be regarded as one individual influencing another to adopt a belief is seen as an idea-replicator reproducing itself in a new host. Analogous to a gene, the meme was conceived as a "unit of culture" (an idea, belief, pattern of behavior, etc.) which is "hosted" in the minds of one or more individuals, and which can reproduce itself in the sense of jumping from the mind of one person to the mind of another. The term meme was coined in Richard Dawkins's 1976 book The Selfish Gene, but Dawkins later distanced himself from the resulting field of study. Less critical arguments suggest memetics is still valid, but analytically holds a smaller academic space in cultural evolutionary theory. It has failed to become a mainstream approach to cultural evolution as the research community has favored models that exclude the concept of a cultural replicator (called "meme"), opting mostly for gene–culture co-evolution, called dual inheritance theory, instead. Ĭritics contend the theory is "untested, unsupported or incorrect". Memetics describes how ideas or cultural information can propagate, but doesn't necessarily imply a meme's concept is factual. Those arguing for the Darwinian theoretical account tend to begin with theoretical analogies from existing biological evolutionary models. Proponents of memetics, as evolutionary culture, describe it as an approach of cultural information transfer. Memetics is the study of information and culture based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution. For the study of Internet memes, see Internet meme. For the critical and philosophical term, see Mimesis. This article is about the study of self-replicating units of culture.
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