Do memes really exist?

Yes. A meme isn’t a biological thing that can be measured or detected - it’s a term to describe how ideas spread. Any idea that competes with other ideas for popularity, and succeeds or fails based on how widely it spreads, is a meme.

Religion is a good example. Let’s say there’s Religion A which teaches its followers to have lots of kids, raise them in the faith, and go door-to-door trying to convert other people... and then there’s Religion B which teaches its followers not to marry or have kids, never to proselytize, and to keep their faith a secret. You’d expect that in a few years, Religion A would have a lot of followers and Religion B would hardly have any, right?

That’s all a meme is: an idea that spreads like a gene. Religion A will spread more widely because the people who follow it are more likely to spread it, just like a certain gene might spread widely because it makes the organism that carries it more likely to have lots of healthy offspring. A meme can be any idea that makes people want to spread it (or makes the people who follow and spread it more likely to survive than the people who don't), from religions and systems of government, to washing your hands or cooking your food, to a catchy tune that people want to hum after they hear it.

There’s no question that memes exist, because ideas do spread like that all the time.

Memes are just one way some scholars track how knowledge and ideas change from generation to generation. Ideas and knowledge are passed from generation to generation, similarly to how genes are passed from parents to children in DNA. Ideas and knowledge that are not useful are not passed on and lost, just as genes that hinder reproduction are replaced with genes that do not.

The difference is that individual genes can be sequences exactly, but ideas can be difficult to quantify and isolate. How have ideas and knowledge about religion or child rearing or farming or marriage evolved over time? It used to be common for a man to have many wives if he could afford it.

That idea has lost favor in most parts of the world and almost disappeared from use. Any number of reasons could be put forward as for why. On the surface, it would seem to maximize reproduction potential, but it would be very expensive to maintain, and could hinder the survival of the family.

There were also outside social pressures to eliminate the practice. Tracking of historical changes and influences on basic ideas like this are of great interest to scientists and historians. Knowing how a society gradually changes and what causes it to change and grow or decay can help encourage growth and stave off decay.

Memes definitely exist, but are they as scientifically observable and quantifiable as DNA? Not in my opinion. General trends can be inferred, and documented historically, but applications for the future are limited.

I hope this helps. Manimal's Recommendations The Meme Machine Amazon List Price: $17.95 Used from: $4.00 Average Customer Rating: 3.5 out of 5 (based on 86 reviews) Virus of the Mind:: The New Science of the Meme Amazon List Price: $15.95 Used from: $8.00 Average Customer Rating: 3.5 out of 5 (based on 62 reviews) The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment Amazon List Price: $24.99 Used from: $12.00 Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 (based on 2 reviews) .

I think you'll find the following article very interesting! I believe they do exist, although.. In The Selfish Gene (1976), Richard Dawkins suggested the concept of the meme, an idea that propagates itself by being passed from brain to brain by imitation, in analogous fashion to the gene, which propagates itself by being passed from body to body via procreation. Memes are the cultural counterparts of genes.

Many materialist evolutionists, including Dawkins himself, think of religions as memes, ideas that infect our brains. Belief in God, according to this view, is a meme that has successfully propagated because it has survival value for those who accept the belief—but that doesn’t means it’s true. It’s just useful for spreading belief.

Oxford theologian and former atheist Alister McGrath reports that most anthropologists and scientists think there’s no such thing. First, the meme is just a hypothesis, and one that we don’t need because there are better models available in, for example, economics and anthropology. If genes could not be seen, we would have to invent them — the evidence demands a biologically transmitted genetic replicator.

Memes can’t be observed, but the evidence can be explained perfectly well without them. Darwinizing Culture by Robert Aunger contains a quote from Maurice Bloch, a professor of anthropology at London School of Economics, that sums it up best: the “exasperated reaction of many anthropologists to the general idea of memes” reflects the apparent ignorance of the proponents of the meme hypothesis about the discipline of anthropology and its major successes in explaining cultural development without feeling the need to develop anything like the idea of a meme at all. At this stage, the issue is simply whether memes exist, irrespective of their implications for religion.

I say, and most active scientists say with me, that there is no evidence for these things. As Simon Conway Morris writes in his book Life’s Solution, memes seem to have no place in serious scientific reflection. “Memes are trivial, to be banished by simple mental exercises.In any wider context, they are hopelessly, if not hilariously, simplistic,” said Morris, a professor of evolutionary paleobiology at the University of Cambridge.

So, memes are hypothetical unobservable entities that are unnecessary to explain reality. How is that different from a purely imaginary entity? And isn’t that what materialists think of God: that he is a hypothetical entity that adds nothing to an account of reality?

Besides, if memes do exist, then atheism is a meme. So much for the conceit that atheists form their views solely on the basis of scientific evidence. Sources: http://magicstatistics.com/2006/06/16/do-memes-really-exist/ Dede's Recommendations The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition--with a new Introduction by the Author Amazon List Price: $15.95 Used from: $8.03 Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 (based on 264 reviews) .

No, they are Dawkins' inventions It was his way of trying to explain, in purely physical and natural terms, the transmission of culture and values and behaviors. He made up the word to sound like 'genes' which are a part of how our physical characteristics are transmitted. We used to call 'memes' teaching, imitation, learning, etc.In that sense it is reality.

In the sense that 'memes' can be 'caught' like a cold, he is nuts.

My conclusion is that they clearly do exist, but that the analogy to genes is overdrawn, because genes ..... tend to mutate incrementally in the context of other interacting genes, so as not to be fatal, whereas memes mutate kind of solo, and if the mutation is bad they affect no other entity. The structure that the Iowa Democratic Party imposes on its caucuses provides an interesting example, in the light of recent research about how fads spread through the agancy of the impressionable, not through that of the impressive.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.