Memetics and memes. They heard the bell, but they don't know where it is. Exclusive

On the Internet, it is now difficult to imagine existence without memes and photo frogs. And how did they appear? Let's figure it out. If in the 2000s and early 2010s there were not so many memes, and they were perceived purely as something elitist (at least because the Internet was not so well developed), now there are a huge number of them, but the majority die in the first days. This is happening because memes have turned into an industry.

The foundations of the theory of memes were laid by Richard Dawkins, an ethologist and evolutionary biologist, in 1976 in his book "The Selfish Gene". In this book, Dawkins puts forward the concept of a replicator, a structure capable of creating copies of itself and multiplying in this way, which is its only purpose. At the same time, such properties as life expectancy (longevity), fecundity (ie, how many copies the replicator creates) and copying accuracy are important for replicator reproduction.

Further, presenting the gene as such a replicator, the author argues that the unit of natural selection is not a species, group or individual, but a gene.

Developing this theory, Dawkins says that the gene creates more and more complex structures that allow it to fulfill its purpose more and more effectively. These structures are carriers or "survival machines" of the gene. Any biological organism can be cited as an example of such a carrier. The ability of a gene to reproduce successfully is determined by its phenotypic effect. For example, let's take a certain mutant gene, due to which fins are formed in an animal at the embryo stage instead of paws (this is precisely the phenotypic effect or phenotype). If the environment clearly does not favor such a mutation, the animal will most likely die, and, therefore, the gene will not be passed on. It is worth noting that this is a crude example, but it is quite suitable for further explanation.

In the 11th chapter of "The Selfish Gene", the author introduces us to a new replicator that no longer functions in a biological, but in a sociocultural meme environment. Accordingly, a meme is not a unit of genetic heredity, but a cultural one.

This concept was further developed by other scientists. In the book "Psychic Viruses", its author, Richard Brody, divides memes into three groups:

1. memes — differences

2. memes — strategies

3. memes — associations

Difference memes allow us to distinguish objects from the mass of others. For example, "table" is a meme-difference, i.e. a concept that allows us to talk about a certain subject.

Strategy memes prescribe certain actions under certain circumstances. "The road must change to a green traffic light."

Memes - associations join other memes, creating chains from them. Often used in advertising.

Like genes, memes have an effect on the carrier, which can be both beneficial and harmful. However, unlike a gene, the survival of a meme depends much less on the survival of the carrier.

Like genes, memes tend to cooperate, forming complexes of memes, or memeplexes. For example, public ideology can be considered as such a memeplex.

The accuracy of copying memes in general is much lower than that of their biological counterparts, which allows memes to mutate at a great speed. If you compare memes with each other, you can see that some memes mutate much more slowly than others. Often this can be explained by the fact that they have some external source of storage that protects them from mutation. In religions, such sources of storage are various sacred texts.

Brody talks about the viral nature of memes in his book. Each person is constantly infected with more and more new memes that, in one way or another, affect his behavior, sometimes even interrupting the influence of a gene. An example of this can be the meme "sacrifice yourself for the family" in some totalitarian countries, which suppresses the instinct of reproduction.

It is possible to become infected with memes through any channel of information transmission with which a person is able to interact: television and radio, the Internet, books and other people. Memes fight for us, for our attention and for a place in our memory. Among them, there is also a natural selection, as a result of which some memes are widely distributed in our culture, while others completely disappear from it.

Some memes are incompatible with others, so they can protect themselves from their own kind. Brody distinguishes two such defense mechanisms: faith and skepticism. Different in their essence, they have the same effect, preventing opponents from penetrating the wearer's consciousness.

Some memes are easier to take root in the mind of the bearer by appealing to biological needs, such as safety, food and sex, which attracts attention to them.

Also, memes can refer to such motives as: a sense of belonging to society, a tendency to altruism, a desire to stand out, a desire to receive approval, obedience to authorities.

The science that studies memes is called "memetics". Memetics is an approach to evolutionary models of information transmission, which is based on the concept of memes, which considers ideas as units of cultural information, distributed among people through imitation, learning, etc.

Almost immediately after its emergence, the memetic movement was divided into those who follow the definition of memes as units of information in the brain, given by Dawkins, and those who want to define them as observable cultural artifacts and behavior.

The two directions of studying memetics were named "internalist" and "externalist". Among the famous internalists \ Lynch and Brody, among the externalists Derek Gatherer, a geneticist from Liverpool John Moores University, and William Benzon, a researcher of cultural evolution and music.

The main justification for externalism is the assertion that the internal structures of the brain cannot be observed and memetics cannot develop as a science, and especially as a science based on quantitative measurements, unless its emphasis is shifted to those aspects of culture that can be directly translated into quantitative data.

The objections of internalists are that brain activity and ego states will eventually be available for observation with the help of new technologies, and that, according to most cultural anthropologists, culture includes beliefs, not artifacts, and that artifacts cannot be replicators in the same sense in which psychic entities or nucleic acids can be considered replicators.

Discussions took such a heated turn that in 1998, at a symposium devoted to memetics, organized within the framework of the 15th International Conference of Cybernetics, a call was made to stop disputes about definitions.

There are a number of unresolved issues in memetics, such as:

How can a meme be measured as a unit of cultural evolution?

– The measurement assumes some kind of notational description for useful notation of the content of the meme.

– The measurement assumes the designation of the reproduction of a meme, historical (the so-called memeology) and current.

– The measurement assumes the availability of tools for predicting future memes.

- How different are biological and cultural evolution?

- What is the interaction between the memetic approach and the latest achievements in the field of computer science, including computational sociology?

- Since memetics deals with issues of cultural evolution and many cultural elements are transmitted through language, why is the area of ​​historical and evolutionary linguistic knowledge ignored when discussing memetics?

- Can memetics meet the classical requirements of science for the validity of studies (falsifiability, coherence, Occam's razor)?

It can be said that the 2010s were the era of millennials. We grew up on these memes, we tamed them, we learned to make money from them. But the next decade will be by buzzers. They consume much more information and are not afraid of change. They don't know what nostalgia is. They love post-irony because the elders don't understand it.

Yulian Khudy, columnist