101 Intro to "Memes"

Memes - you've heard of them. You've even forwarded them. But do you understand them? In his book The Electric Meme, Robert Aunger transports memes from "Airy-Fairy-Land" to solid ground. He compares memes with genes, explains why the brain is a meme factory, and more👇

Memes today are where Genes were in 1930s: a hypothetical entity that explains many observations, but hasn't been biologically pinned down yet. Memes explain the "similarity, duplication, and inheritance" of cultural traits the way genes explain such features in biology.

Robert Aunger believes that memes are strings of neurons in the brain. A meme is a single electrical signal - or a composite of many - that can be preserved for long periods of time, and passed on to other brains. Hence the title: the "electric" meme.

A meme freely changes mediums: jumping from "brain to computer to book and back to brain" - thus muddling the question of replication. When genes are replicated across generations, the medium stays the same - biological entities like DNA and RNA. A meme freestyles across domains.

But genes and memes both perform "the crucial evolutionary tasks of replicating, mutating, and being selected." The same meme - set of ideas - is replicated in different brains, the idea mutates over time, and the selected ideas survive and spread while many others die out.

George Santayana wrote: "Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve." Repetition is the only form of permanence that culture can achieve, too. The fact that a relatively stable set of values can rule a community or nation is due to the durability of memes.

Just as genes construct "additional layers of organization" above them: "proteins, organisms, behavior" - memes also produce complex systems like books, tradition, culture as vehicles that contain, protect, and transmit a certain memetic essence across time and space.

Brain as meme factory: "The brain is secure, stable real estate—a good place for a cultural replicator to set up shop." The blood-brain barrier, which exists as a "firewall" to protect the brain from blood toxins, also ensures the memes have a safe factory for production.

Why idiosyncratic ideas are considered dangerous: An uncommon idea is a rarer meme. It is "more likely to be maladaptive" to the idea-holder as it hasn't "passed the test of being adopted by numerous brains." This is why divergent thinking will always be a little taboo.

Robert Aunger argues that the human brain expanded to accommodate memetic production and memetic transfers. Memes, for all their explanatory power, haven't been biologically located yet. The experimental "discovery" of the meme will be the next big leap for evolutionary science.