The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment

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Balkin maintains that the same structures used to generate ideas about free speech or free markets also serve to generate racistic beliefs. Efficiency of parenthood: an idea that increases the proportion of children who will adopt ideas of their parents. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism—something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. It doesn’t even require the “parasites” to have a malicious bone in their bodies, just like the case of the fluke in the example.

They found out it didn’t work, the forces keeping an atom together were just too different from those keeping a solar system together. Similar memes are thereby included in the majority of religious memeplexes, and harden over time; they become an "inviolable canon" or set of dogmas, eventually finding their way into secular law. Thus, memetics attempts to apply conventional scientific methods (such as those used in population genetics and epidemiology) to explain existing patterns and transmission of cultural ideas. The whole of biological evolution was but a preface to the main story of evolution, the evolution of memes. Strictly speaking, motivationally transmitted memes do not self-propagate, but this mode of transmission often occurs in association with memes self-replicated in the efficiency parental, proselytic and preservational modes.By the same token, if people change what they mean by meme, they’re talking about something else, not memes.

While the term "meme" appeared in various forms in German and Austrian texts near the turn of the 20th century, Dawkin's unrelated use of the term in The Selfish Gene marked its emergence into mainstream study. Of course how much is “high” fidelity isn’t an exact number but if in general (I thought) genes don’t replicate with some high percentage of accuracy then there isn’t enough consistency from one organism to the next for any meaningful changes to even accrue. Dan Deacon, [44] Kalevi Kull [45] separately argued memes are degenerate Signs in that they offer only a partial explanation of the triadic in Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic theory: a sign (a reference to an object), an object (the thing being referred to), and an interpretant (the interpreting actor of a sign). The point of the story is that I went back to school and infected my friends with the skill, and it then spread around the school with the speed of measles and pretty much the same epidemiological time course. I am occasionally accused of having backtracked on memes, of having lost heart, pulled in my horns, had second thoughts.At present, the existence of discrete cultural units which satisfy memetic theory has been challenged in a variety of ways. What is being seen is a process that has evolved through natural selection and favours the genes of lancet fluke or virus, or whatever.

Quotes about selfishness can offer insight into the consequences of this behavior and provide guidance on how to deal with it. I think the more plausible explanation for why some people sacrifice themselves for others is simply that it benefits (the genes of) the people who encourage them, directly or indirectly, to take the sacrifice. Ideas that encourage the proselytism of a meme, as seen in many religious or political movements, can replicate memes horizontally through a given generation, spreading more rapidly than parent-to-child meme-transmissions do. Reflections on the use of spirituality to privilege religion in scientific discourse: Incorporating considerations of self".Selfish people also tend to have victim mindsets… Their actions plant seeds of loneliness; then they cry upon the blooming. The new sense of meme made its Merriam-Webster debut in 2015, defined in full as "an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media.