The History of Meme Studies

Etymology

Richard Dawkins coined "meme" as a cultural analogue to the gene in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.

Historical Background

Evolution After Darwin

During the late 19th Century and the early 20th Century, evolutionary theorists struggled to rescue Darwin from his mistakes, the chief among which was his misunderstanding of genetics. Namely, Darwin believed in blending inheritance and Lamarckism. According to Darwin, an organism produces particles called "gemmules" from all throughout its body, which contain heritable information about the respective organs from which they originate; these gemmules gather at the gonads or the eggs and are passed on during reproduction, and the blend of said gemmules from the parents determine which traits the offspring will inherit. Darwin's theories of inheritance were attacked and criticised by subsequent empirical research, the most famous among which was Francis Galton's experiment involving blood transfusions across different breeds of rabbits, intended to demonstrate Darwin's theory (by producing a new, blended breed of the rabbits).

The Darwin-Lamarck Division

In contrast to Darwin, August Weismann argued that the cells of an organism are strictly divided into the somatic cells, which constitute the body; and the germ plasm, which contain heritable information that produces the somatic cells, but are themselves affected by the somatic cells. Since this distinction between the somatic cells and the reproductive cells makes the inheritance of acquired characteristics impossible, it resulted in the division between Darwinism and Lamarckism. Although Darwin himself subscribed to Lamarckianism, Weismann presented his theory as strictly Darwinian and anti-Lamarckian.

The synthesis of Weismann's germ plasm theory and and Darwinism was referred to as "neo-Darwinism," a term which would be inherited by later Darwinians who continued this tradition of revisionism.

The Modern Synthesis

Also in contrast to Darwin, Gregor Mendel argued that heritable characteristics are unitary and discrete, rather than blended. According to Mendelism, biological inheritance occurs through the recombination of alternate forms (later referred to as "alleles") of particular, heritable characteristics (later referred to as "genes"). For instance, the colours of a flower's petals may be white or purple, and whether an offspring has purple or white petals depends on what combination of the white-making or purple-making alleles get passed down from the parents. This theory opened the door to mathematical genetics, which became the foundation for the reconciliation of Mendelism and Darwinism throughout the early 20th Century.

The resulting movement in evolutionary biology is called The Modern Synthesis.

The Informational Gene

Following the Modern Synthesis, the rising influence of information theory resulted in the development of the view of genes as information. By the time the double helix structure of DNA was discovered by Watson and Crick in 1953, this informational conception of the gene had become explicit. Crick's 1958 "Central Dogma" of molecular biology, occasionally referred to as "molecular Weismannism," states that, during organismic development, DNA causes the production of both genetic material (DNA) and somatic material (protein), but never the other way around (i.e. protein producing DNA).

This synthesis of Weismann's germ plasm theory and modern biochemistry is the basis of "gene-centrism". This distinctly informational view of evolution came to form the theoretical foundation of classical memetics in the hands of Richard Dawkins.

The Hull-Dawkins Distinction

Natural selection, Darwin's chief contribution to the theory of evolution, involves the differential survival and reproduction of the members of a population. The proportion of the different heritable traits within a population varies across generations based on their respective rates of survival and reproduction, resulting in evolution.

Following the Modern Synthesis, the new Neo-Darwinists of the 1960s debated the precise meaning and mechanics of Darwinian evolution. A major component of this debate, known as The Unit of Selection Debate, asked what exactly is being sorted and selected during biological evolution: organisms, groups of organisms, or the genes? Within the debate, the group-selectionists and the gene-selectionists argued, respectively, that natural selection centres around either groups of organisms or their genes. In fact, the very definition of the gene was at the centre of this debate.

Dawkins, following from gene-selectionists such as W.D. Hamilton and G.C. Williams, argued in his 1976 landmark book The Selfish Gene that genes are the sole, fundamental unit of biological evolution. It was in this work that Dawkins coined "meme," as a hypothetical example of an entity other than the gene which could act as a unit of selection. Dawkins, alongside David Hull, continued to develop the conceptual categories to which the gene and its counterparts belong: the replicator (namely, the gene) and the interactor (namely, the phenotype). This distinction between replicators and interactors, known as the Hull-Dawkins Distinction, posits that evolution always involves replicators (entities whose structure gets passed on in successive replications) and interactors (entities whose interaction with the environment causes the differential replication of the replicators). For instance, an organism is an interactor for its genes.