The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment

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Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.” – Oscar Wilde In contemporary biological terminology, when a gene "out-reproduces" other genes (and thereby increases in frequency) because it has some properties that (in its environment) make the gene more likely to be copied (and to be represented in future generations), the gene is said to have increased in frequency because of Darwinian selection. This terminology is the result of an elaboration in statistical language of the ideas that Charles Darwin first presented in The Origin of Species . Dawkins's suggestion in The Selfish Gene was that the same kind of selectionist thinking that biologists apply to biological change might be fruitfully applied to cultural change. He made this suggestion again in The Extended Phenotype , but with the addition of some important caveats. Salingaros, Nikos (2008). "Architectural memes in a universe of information". Theory of Architecture. Umbau-Verlag. ISBN 9783937954073. In what sense then are replicators, whether genes or memes, selfish? The Selfish Gene popularised the view that biological evolution proceeds not for the benefit of the species or even the individual organism, but for the benefit of the underlying replicator. Dennett (1995), presses the important question ‘ Cui Bono?’ or ‘Who benefits?’ revealing the sense in which genes are ‘selfish’. They will get copied whenever and however they can, regardless of the consequences to anything else. This does not mean, as Dawkins pointed out over and over again, that the resulting organisms are selfish. Huma Heylighen, Francis (1992). "Selfish Memes and the Evolution of Cooperation". Journal of Ideas. 2 (4): 77–84.

Eco, Umberto. 1976b. A theory of semiotics. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. 10.1007/978-1-349-15849-2 Search in Google Scholar At first blush, the notion that the self-disclosure impulse is somehow good for the species might seem counterintuitive. If all we did was prattle on about ourselves, we’d soon bore one another to extinction. Why would we have evolved to get a rush of pleasure from hearing ourselves talk?Memes first need retention. The longer a meme stays in its hosts, the higher its chances of propagation are. When a host uses a meme, the meme's life is extended. [36] The reuse of the neural space hosting a certain meme's copy to host different memes is the greatest threat to that meme's copy. [37] A meme that increases the longevity of its hosts will generally survive longer. On the contrary, a meme that shortens the longevity of its hosts will tend to disappear faster. However, as hosts are mortal, retention is not sufficient to perpetuate a meme in the long term; memes also need transmission. Lynch, Aaron (1996). Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society. New York: BasicBooks. p.208. ISBN 9780465084678. Selfishness is like a wall. A useless wall, without a doubt. It cannot hold one’s own joy in. But simply keeps the world’s joy out”

Gottsch, John D. (2001). "Mutation, Selection, And Vertical Transmission Of Theistic Memes In Religious Canons". Journal of Memetics. 5 (1). Archived from the original on 12 April 2021 . Retrieved 8 October 2021. Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2005). Not by genes alone: How culture transformed human evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pettis, Ben T. (19 August 2021). "Know your meme and the homogenization of Web history". Internet Histories. 1–17 (3): 263–279. doi: 10.1080/24701475.2021.1968657. S2CID 238660211. Archived from the original on 17 March 2023 . Retrieved 28 February 2023. upon which they depend. Internal hobgoblins of mind ( Cialdini 1988) or homunculi ( Dennett 1991) with all sorts of Hull, David L. (2001). "Taking memetics seriously: Memetics will be what we make it". In Aunger, Robert (ed.). Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science (1sted.). Oxford University Press. pp.43–67. ISBN 9780192632449.

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For instance, the possibility that ideas were subject to the same pressures of evolution as were biological attributes was discussed in the time of Charles Darwin. T. H. Huxley (1880) claimed that "The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals." [25] Some of the models show that cultural evolution of a Darwinian kind can occur even when cultural variants are not faithfully copied discrete particles (Boyd and Richerson 2005). That is, pace Dawkins, cultural evolution of a Darwinian kind can occur even when, strictly speaking, there are no memes at all. But -- one may wonder -- how is it possible to see culture as an evolutionary system once we give up the assumption that it is made up of particulate gene-like entities? This is obviously an important question. Let me outline the answer. Dennett, Daniel C. (1995). Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster. Aunger, Robert (2002). The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think. New York: Free Press. ISBN 9780743201506.