Horizon

Yes, in that it's a catchphrase, but I think the more interesting memes are the ones that have no obvious author. For example - and I admit it's not a very edifying example - there's the rumor about Richard Gere and the gerbil (if you don't know what I'm talking about, don't ask - move on). I think I first heard this about 10 years ago, and as far as I can tell it's still in circulation, despite futile attempts to debunk it. Who started this story, and why? Why did it succeed when countless other spurious bits of gossip die on the vine?

The Richard Gere story lives, I think, not so much because it involves Richard Gere (although his celebrity gives it more texture and reality) but because Poe's imp of the perserve is at work. People can't seem to restrain themselves from thinking about the sensation of a gerbil in the last place it belongs.

What I wonder about with meme is whether we haven't invented an intelligent-sounding word to make a an old familiar process seem new and exotic.

I think the original idea was that you can make an analogy between the evolution of information by a process of natural selection and the evolution of life. For what it's worth, ISTR that Dawkins is a little tired of the meme and sort of disassociates himself from it now.

Ten years ago? I think I heard it around 1986.

Well, I obviously don't mix in the right circles.

I've never been able to decide whether the concept of memes really explains anything, or whether it is just another way of describing what everyone already knew. Is it really useful to apply evolutionary ideas to ideas, or is it just another intellectual game to play? I think its vogue was (is?) due to the fact that it leads one to think of intangible things as having agency. It's a mistake to ignore the great attraction of any framework which makes perfectly mundane things seem revolutionary. Freudianism is still popular to some degree for the same reason.

I think its vogue was (is?) due to the fact that it leads one to think of intangible things as having agency.

Isn't the opposite the case? As in: one of the easy mistakes to make in thinking about evolutionary science is that there's some agency within the mechanics (call it God, or Fate, or whatever) nudging species towards a predetermined goal - the fallacy that homo sapiens is the inevitable, rather than accidental, result of the whole process. Surely the point about the meme analogy is that there's no agency guiding the success or failure of ideas - no way of knowing beforehand which ideas will be able to propagate themselves across the collective consciousness and which will not.

Well, of course. But listen to the metaphors people use when they talk about it. Memes want to propagate themselves, and so on. It's not a godlike agency that is suggested by this, but rather that ideas themselves use (there we go again) humans in order to survive and, in a sense, reproduce. This overlaying of evolutionary metaphors is highly misleading, but many popularizers of memeism were all too happy to use them indiscriminantly. My point was that I think this is one reason the idea became so popular.

You might very well say, fine, but science is always being misunderstood by non-scientists, so this is no objection.

I'm not so sure. Memes have been let loose in the humanities and social sciences, where intellectual standards are often, sadly, much lower. If it's still possible for people to publish Freudian interpretations of history without being laughed out of a job, then imagine what some debased version of memeism could do.