Memes, and Related Ideas about the Evolution of Culture

Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man. But they don't bite everybody.
---Attrib. Stanislaw Lem

Just what is a meme? Dawkins calls it an imitable behavior, but most people who use the notion are more concerned with ideology than how to lay the table, and even Dawkins cites religion as a bundle of memes --- "viruses of the mind," is his phrase. Which brings me to: Metaphorical uses, as opposed genuine research. Spread of the meme-meme (just the other year I saw in the cultural studies section of the local bookstore a tract called Media Viruses whose palpitating dust-jacket makes it appear as though the secret workings of the world are to be laid bare by the author using the magic tool of "viruses of the mind"; and whose index and bibliography don't even mention Dawkins.) And thought-cliches. And pseudo-events. And propaganda. Is the reputation of The Selfish Gene as a piece of crude Social Darwinism a meme?

How far back does the contagion analogy for ideas go?

Can one have a "memetic illness," the same way some people have genetic illnesses? What would it look like? Organized religion? A millenarian movement?

J. M. Balkin, Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology [Full text free online]
Raymond Boudon [Studies of the mechanisms which make people receptive to ideas, especially bad ideas, by giving them what seem like good reasons to believe them --- sometimes they even are good reasons.]
- The Analysis of Ideology
- The Art of Self-Persuasion
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, ch. 11
Daniel Dennett
- Darwin's Dangerous Idea
- "The Evolution of Evaluators"
- "Memes and the Exploitation of the Imagination"
- "Memes: Myths, Misunderstandings and Misgivings"
Herbert Gintis, Game Theory Evolving
The on-line Journal of Memetics
Stanley Lieberson, A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change [See under sociology.]
Aaron Lynch
- Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads throug Society [This would be one of the best books on memetics, even if there were more than, oh, say, five of them. Review: The Case for the Meme's Eye View]
- "Units, Events and Dynamics in Memetic Evolution," Journal of Memetics 2 [Lots of sound math, few metaphors]
Franco Moretti
- "On Literary Evolution," the last essay in Signs Taken for Wonders (2nd ed. only) [Interesting things to say about how literary forms evolve, but some of his ideas about organic evolution are strange, e.g., that natural selection does not act during radiations.]
- "The Slaughterhouse of Literature", Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000): 207--227
- Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History
W. G. Runciman
- The Social Animal [Primer on sociology, from an evolutionary/memetic point of view. Summary and revision of the highlights of his Treatise on Social Theory.]
- WGR, "On the Tendency of Human Societies to Form Varieties," Proceedings of the British Academy 72 (1986): 149--165 [The 1986 Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology. An early version of his general theory. The title, of course, deliberately echoes that of the paper by Darwin and Wallace announcing natural selection.]
- WGR, "The 'Triumph' of Capitalism as a Topic in the Theory of Social Selection," New Left Review 210 (March-April 1995): 33--47 [Application of the theory to the classic problem of historical sociology (see: Marx, Weber).]
- Michael Rustin, "A New Social Evolutionism?," New Left Review 234 (May-June 1999): 106--126 [Exposition and critique, from the standpoint of the weird mix of Marx, Nietzsche and Althusser that NLR is into these days]
- WGR, "Social Evolutionism: A Reply to Michael Rustin," New Left Review 236 (July-August 1999): 145--153
- "Socialising Darwin," Prospect, April 1998 [Summary of The Social Animal; no longer available online to non-subscribers]
- "The Diffusion of Christianity in the Third Century AD as a Case-Study in the Theory of Cultural Selection", European Journal of Sociology 45 (2004): 3--21 [Nice illustration of one of Runciman's goals, in that it "eschews any attempt at" "law-like cross-cultural generalizations ... in favour of a selectionist analysis explicitly focused on the particular historical environment", while in no way doubting "the existence of universal psychological capacities and dispositions".]
Dan Sperber, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach [Review: How to Catch Insanity from Your Kids (Among Others); or, Histoire naturelle de l'infame. Though Sperber would disclaim being a memeticists, this is one of the two best books on memetics. Sperber also ties all this in neatly to evolutionary psychology.]
Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding, vol. 1, The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts [Genuinely evolutionist --- as in, variation-plus-selection --- picture of how science works and scientific method develops; ditto for other intellectual disciplines worthy of the name work. Excellent, and pre-dates Dawkins by five years.]
Adam Westoby, "The Ecology of Intentions: How to Make Memes and Influence People: Culturology" [Westoby was a political scientist and historian who wrote an excellent book on The Evolution of Communism, but that, despite the title, was before he really became interested in memetics. "The Ecology of Intentions" was the manuscript he was working on at the time of his death. Since it is, in its incomplete form, one of the most sophisticated examinations of what a real science of memes would have to be like, one can only regret Westoby's death all the more strongly.]
Damían H. Zanette and Susanna C. Manrubia, "Vertical Transmission of Culture and the Distribution of Family Names," nlin.AO/0009046

Auger (ed.), Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science [Auger's own book got a really annihilating review by Bill Benzon]
Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics: Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of "Natural Selection" and "Inheritance" to Political Society. [1873; would pre-date James, if it really delivers what the title promises]
Basalla, Evolution of Technology
Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine [Review by Runciman]
Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson
- Culture and the Evolutionary Process
- The Origin and Evolution of Cultures
Pascal Boyer, Tradition as Truth and Communication: A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse
Pascal Boyer and James V. Wertsch (eds.), Memory in Mind and Culture [blurb]
Melissa J. Brown and Marcus W. Feldman, "Sociocultural epistasis and cultural exaptation in footbinding, marriage form, and religious practices in early 20th-century Taiwan", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 106 (2009): 22139--22144
Alan Carling [Attempt at selectionist Marxism. Thanks to Jim Farmelant for the pointer]
- The Proof of the Pudding: Reason and Value in Social Evolution [Unpublished. Synopsis]
- Abstract of a talk on "Darwin and Marx"
Robert L. Carneiro, Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology: A Critical History
Michael Carrithers, Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology and Social Diversity
Laureano Castro and Miguel A. Toro, "The evolution of culture: From primate social learning to human culture", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 101 (2004): 10235--10240
Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach
David Chavalarias and Paul Bourgine, "Metamimetic and the Spatial Prisoner's Dilemna," nlin.AO/0301005
Andrew Chesterman, Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory
Kersten Dautenhahn and Chrystopher L. Nehaniv (eds.), Imitation in Animals and Artifacts
Kate Distin, The Selfish Meme
Lee Alan Dugatkin, The Imitation Factor: Evolution beyond the Gene
R. I. M. Dunbar (ed.), The Evolution of Culture
Durham, Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity
N. J. Enfield, Linguistic Epidemiology: Semantics and Grammar of Language Contact in Mainland Southeast Asia
Gabor Fath and Miklos Sarvary, "A renormalization group theory of cultural evolution", nlin.AO/0312070 [Abstract: "We present a theory of cultural evolution based upon a renormalization group scheme. We consider rational but cognitively limited agents who optimize their decision making process by iteratively updating and refining the mental representation of their natural and social environment. These representations are built around the most important degrees of freedom of their world. Cultural coherence among agents is defined as the overlap of mental representations and is characterized using an adequate order parameter. As the importance of social interactions increases or agents become more intelligent, we observe and quantify a series of dynamical phase transitions by which cultural coherence advances in the society."]
Dorothy M. Fragazy and Susan Perry (eds.), The Biology of Traditions: Models and Evidence [Blurb]
D. Gatherer and N. R. McEwan, "On Units of Selection in Cultural Evolution," Journal of Theoretical Biology, 192 (1998) 409--413
Francisco Gil-White, "Common misunderstandings of memes (and genes)"
Oliver Goodenough, "Cultural Replication Theory and Law" [PDF]
Jürgen Habermas, Communications and the Evolution of Society
J. Richard Harrison and Glenn R. Carroll, Culture and Demography in Organizations [Blurb, ch. 1]
Chip Heath [Gave a great talk at the ICOS seminar at Ann Arbor; see the papers linked to off the seminar website (scroll down to "5 March 2004")]
Dorothy Holland, William Lachicotte, Debra Skinner and Carole Cain, Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds [Blurb]
Susan Hurley and Nick Chater (eds.), Perspectives on Imitation: From Neuroscience to Social Science [2 vol. set, "A state-of-the-art view of imitation from leading researchers in neuroscience and brain imaging, animal and developmental psychology, primatology, ethology, philosophy, anthropology, media studies, economics, sociology, education, and law." Blurb]
Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life [Blurb]
David Kaiser, Kenji Ito and Karl Hall, "Spreading the Tools of Theory: Feynman Diagrams in the USA, Japan, and the Soviet Union", Social Studies of Science 34 (2004): 879--922 [JSTOR]
Jason Kaufman, "Endogenous Explanation in the Sociology of Culture", Annual Review of Sociology 30 (2004): 335--357 [Link]
Laland, Odling-Smee and Feldman, Niche Construction, Biological Evolution and Cultural Change [Also a book by the same name]
Susanna C. Manrubia and Damian H. Zanette, "At the boundary between biological and cultural evolution: The origin of surname distributions," cond-mat/0201559
Herbert Donald Graham Maschner (ed.), Darwinian Archaeologies
Ian McFadyen, Mindwars
Meltzoff and Prinz (eds.), The Imitative Mind
Salikoko S. Mufwene, The Ecology of Language Evolution [Review by Danny Yee]
Richard R. Nelson, "Evolutionary Theories of Cultural Change: An Empirical Perspective" ["the standard articulations of a Universal Darwinism put forth by biologists and philosophers tends to be too narrow, in particular too much linked to the details of evolution in biology, to fit with what is known about cultural evolution." PDF preprint.]
Partha Niyogi, The Computational Nature of Language Learning and Evolution [Blurb]
Michael J. O'Brien and Stephen J. Shennan (eds.), Innovation in Cultural Systems: Contributions from Evolutionary Anthropology [blurb]
Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, "How Phonological Structures Can Be Culturally Selected for Learnability", Adaptive Behavior 13 (2005): 269--280 [PDF preprint, related publications]
Duane Quiatt and Vernon Reynolds, Primate Behaviour: Information, Social Knowledge, and the Evolution of Culture [Blurb]
Luke Rendell and Hal Whitehead, "Culture in Whales and Dolphins"
Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution
Nikolaus Ritt, Selfish Sounds and Linguistic Evolution: A Darwinian Approach to Language Change
W. G. Runciman
- Treatise on Social Theory [esp. vol. II]
- The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection [blurb]
W. G. Runciman, John Maynard Smith and R. I. M. Dunbar (eds.), Evolution of Social Behaviour Patterns in Primates and Man
Donald A. Schon, Invention and the Evolution of Ideas [a.k.a. Displacement of Concepts]
Ute Schöpflug (ed.), Cultural transmission : psychological, developmental, social, and methodological aspects [blurb]
A. B. Schmookler, Parable of the Tribes
Stephen Shennan, Genes, Memes and Human History: Darwinian Archaeology and Cultural Evolution
Stephen Shennan (ed.), Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution [blurb]
Shils, Tradition
Randolph M. Siverson and Harvey Starr, The Diffusion of War: A Study of Opportunity and Willingness
Strauss and Quinn, A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning
Gary Taylor, Cultural Selection [a view from the cultural studies side of the bookshelf, which also doesn't seem to mention Dawkins, but whose author does seem to have read Darwin, if not necessarily any more modern biologists]
William R. Thompson (ed.), Evolutionary Interpretations of World Politics
Bruce G. Trigger, Sociocultural Evolution: Calculation and Contingency [Blurb]
John Ziman (ed.), Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process
Jack Zipes, Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre

Notebooks

Memes, and Related Ideas about the Evolution of Culture