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- Hello, I'm Jonathan,
and on this episode of Brain Stuff,
I'd like to introduce you to my colleague Lil' Bub.
Look how cute she is.
And she has a better 401k package than I do.
And stock options.
But do you know what's even cuter than Lil' Bub?
Lil' Bub and Grumpy Cat together, oh man!
I'm experiencing so many feels!
The only thing that would be better
is if they were joined by Nyan Cat.
You probably recognize my feline friends
as internet phenomena.
There's viral videos about them,
image macros, catchphrases and more.
We often see these referred to online as memes.
But what exactly is a meme, anyway?
Well the term was first coined in 1976
by celebrity scientist Richard Dawkins
in his book The Selfish Gene.
Dawkins argued that Darwinian Evolution
is driven by replicators,
the first being genetics.
The second replicator was a unit of cultural transmission
that he called a meme.
Basically he's talking about self-replicating
units of culture that take on a life of their own.
Dawkins argued that, like genes, memes are replicators
that are copied and have some sort of influence
over their own probability of replication,
and Dawkins wasn't talking about internet cats.
Not yet, anyway.
No, he meant cultural customs like fashion,
art, or even religion.
Like all things Darwinian, only the fittest memes survive.
For example, how about language?
There's a constant struggle going on
between words, grammar, and understanding
that determines what we all agree on as English.
So in the same way that biological evolution
is driven by the survival of the fittest in the gene pool,
cultural evolution is driven
by the most successful memes.
Over the years, Dawkins' ideas were taken further
by other theorists like Daniel Dennett
and Susan Blackmore.
Blackmore even takes it a step further
and suggests that memes account for consciousness itself.
To her, the human mind is simply a nest of memes.
She was basically like,
" Yo dawg, I heard you like memes,
" so I put a meme in your meme
" so you can replicate while you replicate."
Hang on a second, Jonathan.
That's right, I'm interrupting myself
because I can't wait for the next episode
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Try it today and let me know what you think.
Alright, back to me.
Ah, the other me.
I'm so sorry I did that.
See, if genes are riding around in the bodies
of animals and plants, or lumbering robots
as Dawkins calls them,
then memes are when those robots, as in us,
start imitating each other.
We started by copying gestures, sounds,
and other behaviors from one another.
This evolved into stories and books,
philosophical concepts and other complex ideas.
Success!
The way this theoretically works
is that memes evolve through the process of
variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance.
Each of these affects the meme's ability to reproduce
or be imitated further.
Some memes may go extinct.
One does not simply survive, reproduce, and mutate.
Dawkins, for example, considered the idea of God
to be a meme with high survival value
that's reproduced and evolved throughout humanity.
And if you hadn't guessed it already,
Dawkins is an atheist.
Now Blackmore thinks of human beings
as meme machines that use language
like symbiotic parasites to shape culture
by infecting our minds.
In 2008, she took this concept one step further
and argued that we're currently experiencing
the beginning of third evolutionary
replication process based around technology
and digital information which she calls,
wait for it,
temes.
Now, memetics definitely has its critics.
You know what the kids say.
Haters gonna hate.
(record scratching)
Do the kids still say that?
Well some scholars think it's silly and meaningless.
H. Allen Orr at the University of Rochester
once called it cocktail party science.
Many meme detractors dislike how the theory
discounts human autonomy.
It implies that while we think
we're carefully selecting our belief systems,
we're actually choosing the safest ideas
that are most likely to pass on to other people.
Like the infamous honey badger,
memes don't give a (bleep).
So as long as we keep sharing harmless videos
of cats on the internet,
new ones will continue to be published,
eventually transforming into the next
viral video sensation.
Maybe it's the one you're watching right now.
I could only be so lucky.
So what do you think?
Are memes in control of our minds and culture?
Or are they just pseudo-science balderdash?
Let us know in the comments below,
and if you want to keep this Brain Stuff
meme replicating, click on that like button
and subscribe to our channel.
See you soon!
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