Memetics

Memetics is a study of information and culture. While memetics originated as an analogy with Darwinian evolution, digital communication, media, and sociology scholars have also adopted the term "memetics" to describe an established empirical study and theory described as Internet Memetics.[1] Proponents of memetics, as evolutionary culture, describe it as an approach of cultural information transfer. Those arguing for the Darwinian theoretical account tend to begin from theoretical arguments of existing evolutionary models. Those arguing for Internet Memetics, by contrast, tend to avoid reduction to Darwinian evolutionary accounts. Instead some of these suggest distinct evolutionary approaches.[2][3][4][5] Memetics describes how ideas or cultural information can propagate, but doesn't necessarily imply a meme's concept is factual.[6]

Critics contend the theory is "untested, unsupported or incorrect".[7] It has failed to become a mainstream approach to cultural evolution as the research community has favored models that exclude the concept of a cultural replicator (called "meme"), opting mostly for gene-culture co-evolution[8] or dual inheritance theory[9] instead. Less critical arguments suggest memetics is still valid, but analytically holds a smaller academic space in cultural evolutionary theory.[10] Alternatively, Internet Memetics has yet to provide a tested theory of evolution, having sparse empirical studies.[11] As such, it also struggles to be tested or adopted as an agreeable theory of evolution in a digital context.

The term meme was coined in Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene, but Dawkins later distanced himself from the resulting field of study.[12] Analogous to a gene, the meme was conceived as a "unit of culture" (an idea, belief, pattern of behavior, etc.) which is "hosted" in the minds of one or more individuals, and which can reproduce itself in the sense of jumping from the mind of one person to the mind of another. Thus what would otherwise be regarded as one individual influencing another to adopt a belief is seen as an idea-replicator reproducing itself in a new host. As with genetics, particularly under a Dawkinsian interpretation, a meme's success may be due to its contribution to the effectiveness of its host. However, contemporary to Dawkins, reduction of a meme to an immaterial idea was contested during memetics' early theoretical developments.[13] Daniel Dennett went as far as to say "a meme's existence depends on a physical embodiment," [14] rather than the other way around. Nevertheless, contemporary memetics tends to refer to these early memetic arguments as reducible to "mentalism".[15]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics