The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment

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a b Laurent, John (1999). "A Note on the Origin of 'Memes'/'Mnemes' ". Journal of Memetics. 3 (1): 14–19. Archived from the original on 13 April 2021.

Gill, Jameson (2011). "Memes and narrative analysis: A potential direction for the development of neo-Darwinian orientated research in organisations" (PDF). EURAM 11: Proceedings of the European Academy of Management. European Academy of Management: 0–30. ISSN 2466-7498. S2CID 54894144. Archived (PDF) from the original on 10 October 2021 . Retrieved 5 April 2022.Miszei-Ward, Rachel. 2012. Politics, race, and political fly-billing. Comparative American Studies 10. 177–187. 10.1179/1477570012Z.00000000013 Search in Google Scholar At present, the existence of discrete cultural units which satisfy memetic theory has been challenged in a variety of ways. What is critical from this perspective is that in denying memetics unitary status is to deny a particularly fundamental part of Dawkins' original argument. In particular, denying memes are a unit, or are explainable in some clear unitary structure denies the cultural analogy that inspired Dawkins to define them. If memes are not describable as unitary, memes are not accountable within a neo-Darwinian model of evolutionary culture. Dawkins, Richard (1982). The Extended Phenotype. Oxford University Press. p.109. ISBN 9780192860880. Freud, Sigmund 1913. On the interpration of dreams, D. A. Brill (trans). New York Macmillan. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Interpretation_of_Dreams (accessed 21 September 2020). 10.1037/10561-000 Search in Google Scholar

Claude I. Salem, The New York Times Magazine, 17 Apr. 2011 The Internet and a New Meaning of 'Meme'

Stang, Nicholas F. 2018. Kant’s transcendental idealism. In Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism (accessed 21 March 2019). Search in Google Scholar Dawkins's gene-selectionism has been criticised by many authors (myself included, Mameli 2004) and for many reasons (sometimes good, sometimes not so good). But the importance of The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype is undeniable. In those books, Dawkins summarised and developed some new strategies for thinking about evolutionary processes that authors like William D. Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, and George C. Williams had elaborated in the previous decades. Dawkins's writings contributed to the spread of these important ideas and engendered an interesting debate about the relative merits of different conceptions of biological change. My opinion is that gene-selectionism has some important limitations (and, thereby, mischaracterises in some important ways biological evolution) but is an interesting (and sometimes useful) way of looking at evolutionary processes. Can we say the same about meme-selectionism? Can The Selfish Meme do for culture what The Selfish Gene did for biology? Our cultural life is full of things that seem to propagate virus-like from one mind to another: tunes, ideas, catchphrases, fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. In 1976 I coined the word meme (rhymes with cream) for these self-replicating units of culture that have a life of their own.

For the usage of the term on the Internet, see Internet meme. For other uses, see Meme (disambiguation).Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and simulation, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Search in Google Scholar