Memes Can Be Good For You
I stumbled across this nice summation in reading through Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell. Leading up to this passage, Dennett argues against the common conception of memes as mental viruses that necessarily do harm to their hosts by specifically describing the ability of religions to organize individuals into cohesive groups.
Memes that foster human group solidarity are particularly fit (as memes) in circumstances in which host survival (and hence host fitness) most directly depends on hosts’ joining forces in groups. The success of such meme-infested groups is itself a potent broadcasting device, enhancing group curiosity (and envy) and thus permitting linguistic, ethnic, and geographic boundaries to be more readily penetrated.
I still haven’t seen any really convincing work demonstrating the predictive capabilities of memetics (though I certainly could have missed something), but the field does provide some really elegant mechanisms for describing certain kinds of phenomena.
This entry was posted on Saturday, February 27th, 2010 at 11:16 pm and is filed under neuroscience, science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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