The History of Meme Studies

Etymology

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

Major Traditions of Meme Studies

Memetics

Memetics, most commonly known in its Dawkinsian form, is a tradition of meme studies that descends from Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Memetics was motivated by the units of selection debate in evolutionary genetics and the philosophy of biology: the ongoing debate about the ontology of natural selection and evolution. The meme concept was originally devised by Dawkins to illustrate his conjecture that genes are the sole unit of selection in natural selection, at a time when the exact concept of the gene was far more contentious than it is today. Memetics takes as its basis an attempt to analogise biological evolution and cultural evolution, beginning as a school of thought within the philosophy of biology and aspiring towards the status of science.

Foundational texts

• The Selfish Gene (1976) by Richard Dawkins
• Metamagical Themas (1985) by Douglas Hofstadter
• Consciousness Explained (1993) by Daniel Dennett
• The Meme Machine (1998) by Susan Blackmore
• The Electric Meme (2002) by Robert Aunger

Memeology

Memeology developed as a reaction against the overwhelming influence of Dawkinsianism on meme studies, interpreted by both its supporters and critics as downplaying human agency in cultural evolution. Whereas memetics grew out of debates within the natural sciences and the philosophies of mind and biology predating the World Wide Web, memeology was developed by social scientists with a focus on Internet memes as the paradigmatic meme object. Memeology emphasises the human aspect of meme studies, strategically adopting Dawkins' definition of memes and taking memetics as a jumping-off point for a new, more holistic tradition of meme studies.

Foundational Texts

• Darwinizing Culture (2000) edited by Robert Aunger
• The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment (2002) by Kate Distin
• A New Literacies Sampler (2007) edited by Colin Lankshear & Michele Knobel
• Memes in Digital Culture: Reconciling With a Conceptual Troublemaker (2013) by Limor Shifman

Memeography

Memeography is best understood as the empirical counterpart to memeology. Where memeology focuses on identifying and analysing phenomena that best correspond to ontologies of memes established within the memetics tradition, memeography takes folk-memetic ontologies (namely, ordinary language uses of "meme" in reference to remixed and reposted digital media) as a jumping-off point in order to study their behaviour. The question of precise ontology is deferred to the findings derived from the study of entities within conveniently selected parameters, if not excluded altogether. In other words, memeography is the scientific study of cybercultural phenomena which are commonly recognised as memes by the typical user. One corollary of such research is the identification of phenomena which may not be recognised by the typical user as a meme but nonetheless behave "like memes" based on other criteria. Memeographers make use of digital methods in order to identify patterns within memeculture.

Seminal Texts

• "A Population Memetics Approach to Cultural Evolution in Chaffinch Song: Meme Diversity Within Populations" (1993) by Alejandro Lynch & Allan J. Baker
• "Three Challenges for the Survival of Memetics" (2005) by Bruce Edmonds
• "Competition among memes in a world with limited attention" (2012) by L. Weng, A. Flammini, A. Vespignani & F. Menczer
• "On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities" (2018) by Zannettou, S., et al.

Memetic Engineering

Memetic Engineering, or applied memetics, is the application of meme studies to questions relevant to real-world cases of memetic phenomena. A key characteristic of memetic engineering is its participatory nature: the researchers are also memeculturalists. It is grounded in autoethnographic work, traditionally carried out by high-expertise, high-commitment participants within the respective memetic subcultures for primarily practical purposes. This nascent tradition is the consequence of the rising academic interest in memes as well as the self-conscious intellectual maturity of the communities of memetic practice themselves.

Notable Resources

• The Philosopher's Meme, "an organization of users dedicated to Internet memes and all that relates to them... an experiment in distributed research into Internet culture."
• Clusterduck, "an interdisciplinary collective working in the fields of new media studies, design and transmedia, investigating processes and actors behind the creation of Internet-based content."
• Meme Studies Research Network, "an international and interdisciplinary research network for scholars who study memes."
• Bibliotheca Anonoma, "A research task force archiving, documenting, and safeguarding Internet Folklife."
• Internet Histories, "an international, inter-disciplinary peer-reviewed journal concerned with research on the cultural, social, political and technological histories of the internet and associated digital cultures."
• Bard Meme Lab, "An interdisciplinary research group focusing on digital memes, online media, and content dissemination."

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 meaning and mechanics of natural selection. The most what exactly is being selected in natural selection, known as "The Unit of Selection Debate".

Within the debate, the group-selectionists and the gene-selectionists argued, respectively, that natural selection centres around groups of organisms or their genes. In fact, the very nature 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.

However, Dawkins emphasised that, in principle, entities which share the same core characteristics of genes that make them the units of natural selection could also be their own units of evolution in their own right.

Dawkins, along with David Hull, developed the distinction between replicators and their vehicles,

Working backwards from his thesis that natural selection requires gene-like entities which are exposed to differential survival, Dawkins introduced the hypothetical entity called the "meme," the units of cultural evolution.