I Think You Dont Know What That Word Means Meme Gene
Nearly people know that the give-and-take "meme" was coined past legendary evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his seminal 1976 book The Selfish Cistron. What few realize, notwithstanding, is that the song atheist and champion of evidence as the holy grail of life, who even penned a children's book rebutting religious mythology with science, had his first feel of a truthful meme, decades before he had the discussion for it, in a religious context. In his birthday fantastic new memoir, An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist (public library), Dawkins describes his largely unhappy days at boarding school, where he was sent away at the age of seven:
Every night in the dormitory we had to kneel on our beds, facing the wall at the caput, and take turns on successive evenings to say the goodnight prayer:
Lighten our darkness, nosotros beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy dandy mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night. Amen.
None of us had ever seen information technology written down, and we didn't know what it meant. We copied it parrot manner from each other on successive evenings, and consequently the words evolved towards garbled meaninglessness. Quite an interesting examination instance in meme theory. . . . If nosotros had understood the words of that prayer, we would not have garbled them, because their pregnant would have had a 'normalizing' effect, similar to the 'proofreading' of DNA. It is such normalization that makes it possible for memes to survive through enough 'generations' to fulfill the analogy with genes. But because many of the words of the prayer were unfamiliar to us, all we could practise was imitate their sound, phonetically, and the issue was a very high 'mutation rate' as they passed down the 'generations' of male child-to-boy imitation.
Dawkins adds that information technology would exist interesting to investigate this consequence experimentally, merely admits he'due south yet to exercise information technology. (I wonder whether he knows of Buckminster Fuller'southward scientific revision of The Lord's Prayer.)
But rather than mindlessly succumbing to the meme, young Dawkins plant himself asking the types of profoundly philosophical questions of which children are capable, and seeking their answers in science rather than religion:
I became a secret reader. In the holidays from boarding schoolhouse, I would sneak upwards to my bedroom with a book: a guilty truant from the fresh air and the virtuous outdoors. And when I started learning biology properly at schoolhouse, information technology was still bookish pursuits that held me. I was fatigued to questions that grown-ups would take chosen philosophical. What is the significant of life? Why are we hither? How did it all start?
Most thirty years later, he came to formulate his meme theory in The Selfish Gene, which remains an essential slice of cultural literacy. In considering the primeval soup of "replicators" responsible for the origin of all life, he casts human being civilization as a different kind of "primeval soup" driven by the same mechanisms and coins his concept of the "meme," which has since itself mimetically overtaken popular culture, even offering a pronunciation pointer:
I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged. . . . It is staring us in the face. It is even so in its infancy, yet drifting clumsily nigh in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary modify at a charge per unit which leaves the old gene panting far behind.
The new soup is the soup of human culture. Nosotros need a proper noun for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of fake. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I desire a monosyllable that sounds a bit similar 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, information technology could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même. Information technology should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, wearing apparel fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Simply as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, then memes propagate themselves in the meme puddle by leaping from encephalon to encephalon, via a process which, in the broad sense, can be chosen imitation.
Returning to his days at public schoolhouse, Dawkins offers another intriguing example of meme theory in activity by way of "the weirdness of nickname evolution," which operates much like mimetic mutation:
One friend of mine was chosen 'Colonel', although there was nothing remotely military machine about his personality. 'Seen the Colonel anywhere?' Here's the evolutionary history. Years earlier, an older boy, who had by now left the school, was said to have had a beat on my friend. That older male child's nickname was Shkin (corruption of Skin, and who knows where that came from — perhaps some connection with foreskin, but that name would have evolved earlier I arrived). Then my friend inherited the name Shkin from his former admirer. Shkin rhymes with Thynne, and at this point something akin to Cockney rhyming slang stepped in. At that place was a character in the BBC radio Goon Evidence chosen Colonel Grytte Pyppe Thynne. Hence my friend became Colonel Grytte Pyppe Shkin, later contracted to 'Colonel'. We loved the Goon Show, and would vie with each other to mimic (as did Prince Charles, who went to a similar school around the aforementioned time) the voices of the characters: Bluebottle, Eccles, Major Denis Bloodnok, Henry Crun, Count Jim Moriarty. And we gave each other Goon nicknames like 'Colonel' or 'Count.'
An Ambition for Wonder is an birthday fantastic read, offering a fascinating glimpse of how 1 of today's most influential scientific minds blossomed into himself.
Source: https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/10/02/richard-dawkins-meme-appetite-for-wonder/
0 Response to "I Think You Dont Know What That Word Means Meme Gene"
Post a Comment