Welcome to MeowDose, a podcast that micro-doses STEM topics with humor, insight, and magic. Each MeowDose episode features a different excerpt from a Wooden Books series.
This episode is about Memes, a topic written about in Evolution by Gerard Cheshire.
If you would like to learn more about Wooden Books and the titles they offer, more information can be found here: Wooden Books Official Site
Episode Transcript
This is MeowDose, and I’m Kitty. And today's dose is coming from a book called Evolution put out by Wooden Books. This is a page on ‘Memes’ so if you want to read along.
“Memes: self-replicating thoughts and cultural viruses”
What? Self-replicating thoughts and cultural viruses? This gives such meaning to just like…Okay, I gotta I just gotta keep reading. Cultural viruses? Why am I thinking about Hackers? But, I mean this plays into it. Hackers, the movie, but also, about people.
“Using biological evolution to help better understand cultural evolution, Richard Dawkins, in 1976, invented the concept of the ‘meme’ as the cultural equivalent to the gene,”
What?
“...defining it as a unit of cultural information existing within a ‘meme pool’.”
A meme pool? Why is this the first time I'm hearing about a meme pool?
I mean, I love a good meme. I also really liked the, it's not an exact alliteration, but it's like saying a word, and the way it made your mouth feel when you said it? I love words, hyperlexia, but meme has a similar feeling as gene. There is like a vibrational tone. Maybe it's the closeness proximity to n and m. But wow.
Okay, back to it.
“Memes manifest from thoughts or discoveries, and either survive in the meme pool or die off, depending on their value as perceived by living, behavioral individuals.”
Okay, so this is interesting.
First off, I just want to cycle back to the fact that the idea or concept of a meme is not tied to this, kind of, digital landscape of the internet. It's not tied to what we think of when you say ‘meme’ in 2022. A meme is just a unit of cultural information that was established by some person in the 70s, 1970s. This idea that cultural information can be kind of funneled down to a single unit. A meme is just a unit, a unit to describe a piece of information. Other things like units are centimeters, inches, gallons, liters. A meme is just a cultural, a unit of cultural information, which is really cool to think about. Similar to a gene, which is literally just a biological unit of biological information in our bodies.
Okay, back to it.
“Memes may also be represented in cultural patterns. A selection, perhaps, for a preference for a particular way of dressing, dining or dancing, sends out cultural information arrays, which offer differing benefits to each individual that comes into contact with it. As this information feeds back between individuals and their groups, the effects spread, and new subcultures form.”
Okay? What? This is really fascinating.
This kind of gets into the idea of, feels similar to the idea of a probability or a statistical anomaly that could function in the dissemination of information, but looking at it as a cultural piece of information and how that is disseminated. It's referencing that, that this the actual act of releasing, right, because culture is through a relational experience, that these memes actually create waves, social waves that will feed back into each other. And if the meme, or the idea of a unit of cultural information, is a kind of a thing that can be, that has its own sort of evolution, cultural evolution, just by the mere fact that it exists. Once it kind of cycles back into the same system of relating, that it already existed in, then it kind of adds a second layer. And that's where you get the idea of a subculture, which is kind of like a subset of a main aspect of culture. And so that's really cool, because it kind of shows the weave patterns of culture.
Okay, back to it.
“Memetics, the study of memes, describes how fashions come and go in what are often compared to viral or contagious effects.”
What? I mean, this is just kind of really putting a whole new spin on the idea of going ‘viral’.
What does it mean to go ‘viral'? And why is that same terminology used for the cultural spread of information through this single unit, which is a meme. And now we have so many ways that memes show up through so many different social and digital platforms, that it's not just this relational experience, away from the keyboard, but it is also a relational experience at the keyboard. So, this is wild. Okay, wait, back to it.
“Other examples of memetic patterns include words, songs, phrases, beliefs, trends, habits, and so on. Meme-gene coevolution, or Dual-Inheritance Theory, explains the ecology responsible for some of our ways of doing things and their genetic influences.”
Lactose intolerance, lactose, I read that wrong.
“Lactose tolerance, the Western acquisition of an adaptation involving increased tolerance to cow's milk is just one example.”
The fact that I misspoke about that I know more people that are lactose intolerant. So, I also don't know when this book was written. But I guess what it's saying is that lactose tolerance was actually an adaptation. So, the meme-gene coevolution, there was something tied to drinking a particular milk as a cultural piece of information that then was deeply connected to an actual biological adaptation that needed to support that cultural piece of information. What the fuck? Wow. I mean, that's wild.
Okay, let's keep reading.
“Other theories suggest stranger forces at play.”
Stranger than what? Stranger Than Wyatt? These are the actual Stranger Things. It's just memes. That's what it is. 1976! That's when a meme, the word meme, 1976.
Okay.
“Rupert Sheldrake, in studies from 1999-2005, show that many people can sense when they are being stared at.”
It's true. It's true. Have you ever tried to close your eyes? And guess when someone's staring at you? If you didn't play that game, in grade school, then you weren't as weird of a child as I was. I did play this game with my friends, because it was a thing that you could feel when someone was staring at you. At least I could. But Rupert Sheldrake speaks to this.
And actually this, this feeling has a name.
“His theory of morphic resonance proposes that similarly shaped ideas sometimes travel instantaneously between similarly shaped homes. Memes could be traveling between minds as quantum synchronicities and an entangled holographic universe.”
What? I mean, I'm into it. That sounds good. I'm into that.
I'm into having such a deep connection with memes that they can travel from my mind, and maybe into your mind? Usually the memes that I think about involve cats, a lot of cat memes. I do think that LOLcats were some of the earlier, earlier memes, online memes that I got into. And really, if a meme is just a unit of cultural information, there is nothing more culturally relevant to the idea of digital memes than cats. I'm not wrong. I love LOLcats. Cats are, cats make the internet and if the internet is made of memes, and then cats are just memes. And then cats are just cultural pieces of information. I don't know. It makes sense to me.
Self-replicating thoughts and cultural viruses. I don't know. It feels like it is self-replicating. That idea is a misnomer. Because if a meme is a cultural piece of information, culture is really shared. It's relational. And so it can be self-replicating if it's internalized culture, which oftentimes our external culture becomes internalized. And if memes are sprouting out from kind of like echo chambers of recycling back these cultural pieces of information to create new sub genres and subcultures. I mean, anything's possible. Anything's possible, but it's really community replicated. It's not just self-replicated. It's also community replicated. 1976. Wow, awesome.
Go out there and find some memes. Have fun. Hope they have cats in them.
MeowDose: cultural viruses