Maturity
In 2005, the Journal of Memetics – Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission ceased publication and published a set of articles on the future of memetics. The website states that although "there was to be a relaunch...after several years nothing has happened". Susan Blackmore has left the University of the West of England to become a freelance science writer and now concentrates more on the field of consciousness and cognitive science. Derek Gatherer moved to work as a computer programmer in the pharmaceutical industry, although he still occasionally publishes on memetics-related matters. Richard Brodie is now climbing the world professional poker rankings. Aaron Lynch disowned the memetics community and the words "meme" and "memetics" (without disowning the ideas in his book), adopting the self-description "thought contagionist". Lynch lost his previous funding from a private sponsor and after his book royalties declined, he was unable to support himself as a private memetics/thought-contagion consultant. He died in 2005.
Susan Blackmore (2002) re-stated the definition of meme as: whatever is copied from one person to another person, whether habits, skills, songs, stories, or any other kind of information. Further she said that memes, like genes, are replicators in the sense as defined by Dawkins. That is, they are information that is copied. Memes are copied by imitation, teaching and other methods. The copies are not perfect: memes are copied with variation; moreover, they compete for space in our memories and for the chance to be copied again. Only some of the variants can survive. The combination of these three elements (copies; variation; competition for survival) forms precisely the condition for Darwinian evolution, and so memes (and hence human cultures) evolve. Large groups of memes that are copied and passed on together are called co-adapted meme complexes, or memeplexes. In her definition, the way that a meme replicates is through imitation. This requires brain capacity to generally imitate a model or selectively imitate the model. Since the process of social learning varies from one person to another, the imitation process cannot be said to be completely imitated. The sameness of an idea may be expressed with different memes supporting it. This is to say that the mutation rate in memetic evolution is extremely high, and mutations are even possible within each and every interaction of the imitation process. It becomes very interesting when we see that a social system composed of a complex network of microinteractions exists, but at the macro level an order emerges to create culture.
Read more about this topic: Memeticist, History of The Term
Famous quotes containing the word maturity:
“Adolescence is society’s permission slip for combining physical maturity with psychological irresponsibility.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“When a man reaches his maturity in understanding and in years, the feeling comes over him that his father was wrong to beget him.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“[How] the young . . . can grow from the primitive to the civilized, from emotional anarchy to the disciplined freedom of maturity without losing the joy of spontaneity and the peace of self-honesty is a problem of education that no school and no culture have ever solved.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)