Biography
After obtaining bachelors degrees in mathematics and philosophy from the University of Illinois, Lynch accepted a position in 1979 as an engineering physicist at Fermilab where he spent some time working on the PDP-11 hardware project. In his spare time, he worked on developing his thesis into a book which he also planned to title, Abstract Evolution.
He worked extensively on the theoretical underpinnings of idea self-replication, developing a symbolic language and deriving mathematics from epidemiologic formulae to describe idea transmission through populations. While conducting a literature search for his book, Lynch discovered the work of anthropologist F.T. Cloak on socially transmitted technology in birds, and a brief proposal for a field of Memetics in Richard Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene, although Lynch was not aware of these authors' work until after his own theory was substantially developed. Early chapters of his book came to the attention of Douglas Hofstadter, who featured it in his Scientific American column Metamagical Themas in 1983. The first draft of the book was complete as early as 1984. A grant from a former colleague who had become a video technology millionaire enabled Lynch to leave Fermilab in 1990 and concentrate full-time on writing.
In the early 1990s, he contributed theoretical and mathematical models on idea transmission to the Journal of Ideas, the first scholarly journal dedicated to memetics.
Lynch's book, after considerable revision, was eventually published in 1996 as Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society.
In 1998, Lynch's "Units, Events and Dynamics in Memetic Evolution," provided much of his scholarly theoretical work omitted by "Thought Contagion". The paper detailed precise conceptual definitions of memetic terms, symbolic language to model idea replication, and mathematics to model population level idea transmission summarizing a decade of his conceptual work.
In August 2004, Lynch appeared to accuse Fast Company magazine and Seth Godin of plagiarism, claiming his complaint was backed, or even encouraged, by an unnamed 'major writers organization'.
Aaron Lynch died on November 14, 2005 at the age of 47 years from anoxic encephalopathy after taking an overdose of an opiate-based pain killer, described as an accident in the Coroner's Report. His remains are buried in Homewood Gardens in Homewood, Illinois.
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