The secret life of misquotes
Various
- “Investigating the Relative Influence of Genes and Memes in Healthcare” by Alistair Sutcliffe and Di Wang (Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 15 (2) 1; 2012.03.31) – http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/15/2/1.html
Abstract: The process by which genes and memes influence behaviour is poorly understood. Genes generally may have a strong influence as predispositions directing individuals towards certain behaviours; whereas memes may have a less direct influence as information inputs to cognitive processes determining behaviour. In certain areas of medical science, knowledge has progressed towards approximate quantification of genetic influences, while social psychology can provide models of mimetic influence as the spread of attitudes. This paper describes a computational model integration of genetic and mimetic influences in a healthcare domain. It models mimetic influences of advertising and health awareness messages in populations with genetic predispositions towards obesity; environmental variables influence both gene expression and mimetic force. Sensitivity analysis using the model with different population network structures is used to investigate the relative force of meme spread and influence.
Keywords: Agent Models, Network Simulations, Health Informatics, Bayesian Models
- “I Can Has Degree? Academia Takes On Internet Memes” by Megan Gibson (Time; 2011.09.20) – http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/09/20/i-can-has-degree-academia-takes-on-internet-memes/
The Independent reports that studying memes and their cultural impact has now become a legitimate area of research for some institutions of higher learning.
- Time’s news collections on memes
- “Memes: Take a look at miaow” (The Independent; 2011.09.19)- http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/memes-take-a-look-at-miaow-2356797.html
What links silly cat pictures and Richard Dawkins? Jean Hannah Edelstein meets the academics trying to understand our love of internet ‘memes’
- “This Woman Getting a Master’s Degree In LolCats Will Be Richer Than You” (Gawker; 2011.09.19) – http://gawker.com/5841779/this-woman-getting-a-masters-degree-in-lolcats-will-be-richer-than-you
- “US Intelligence Agency to Compile Mountain of Metaphors” (SlashDot; 2011.05.24) – http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=21171184
coondoggie writes “Researchers with the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity want to build a repository of metaphors. You read that right. Not just American/English metaphors mind you but those of Iranian Farsi, Mexican Spanish and Russian speakers. Why metaphors? ‘Metaphors have been known since Aristotle as poetic or rhetorical devices that are unique, creative instances of language artistry (for example: The world is a stage; Time is money). Over the last 30 years, metaphors have been shown to be pervasive in everyday language and to reveal how people in a culture define and understand the world around them,’ IARPA says.”
- “Apple of my eye? US fancies a huge metaphor repository” by Layer 8 (Network World; 2011.05.23) – http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/apple-my-eye-us-fancies-huge-metaphor-reposit
Metaphor Program:
- Shape how people think about complex topics and can influence beliefs;
- Reduce the complexity of meaning associated with a topic by capturing or expressing patterns;
- Show uncovered inferred meanings and worldviews of particular groups or individuals: Characterization of disparities in social issues and contrasting political goals; exposure of inclusion and exclusion of social and political groups and understanding of psychological problems and conflicts.
- “Under the Influence: How the Group Changes What We Think – Researchers Study What Gives Social Norms Their Power” by Shirley S. Wang (Wall Street Journal; 2011.05.03) – http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704436004576298962165925364.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
- Social Contagion in The Middle East (Psychology Today; 2011.02.24) – http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/insight-therapy/201102/social-contagion-in-the-middle-east
- The “Godwin’s Law” is an example of memetic attractor.
- “What is your Love Story?” By Robert Sternberg (Psychology Today; 2000.07.01) – http://www.psychologytoday.com/print/22102
- Thomas Jefferson quote (on the virulence and the inexhaustiveness of replication of ideas):
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
Sources:
- alt.memetics bibliography – March 19, 2002 – http://www.lucifer.com/virus/alt.memetics/faq.html
- Memetics section and KultureZone: http://www.evolutionzone.com/kulturezone/memetics/
- Selfless Memes, Johan J. Bolhuis, DOI: 10.1126/science.1181554, Science Vol. 326. no. 5956, p. 1063, 2009/11/20 – http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1181554
As he has done in earlier books, de Waal gives a lively and colorful account of the behavior of our closest living relatives, the great apes. He also reports the exploits of other species, including his pet cat and, indeed, himself. The Age of Empathy is not a dry scholarly monograph but an appealing mixture of scientific findings, anecdotes, and his personal views of human behavior.
- An attempt to define a meme in simple terms – http://www.bunkersofism.com/2009/12/whats-meme-by-definition-meme-is.html
- Most Valuable Memes of The Singularity Summit ’09 – http://www.bunkersofism.com/2009/10/most-valuable-memes-of-singularity.html
- Dominator Culture by Mark S. Bilk (msb@netcom.com), March 20, 1995 – http://web.archive.org/web/19960101-re_/http:/www.lucifer.com/virus/alt.memetics/dominator.html
- alt.memetics – http://www.lucifer.com/virus/alt.memetics/index.html
- Memetics – http://aleph.se/Trans/Cultural/Memetics/
- Meme Central – http://www.memecentral.com/
- A collection of memetics-related writing – http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/liane/
- Anders Transhuman Pages: Memetics – http://aleph.se/Trans/Cultural/Memetics/
- C-Realm – http://www.c-realm.com/
- Christianity Meme – http://www.christianitymeme.org/
- Colorless Green Homunculi by William L. Benzon – http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/benzon.html
- Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology – http://www.culturalsoftware.com
- Ecology of Intentions, The: How to Make Memes and Influence People: Culturology – http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/ecointen.htm
- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky – http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html
- Germs and Ideas – http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/Germs_and_Ideas/
- Hans-Cees Speel’s Memetics Page – http://www.sepa.tudelft.nl/webstaf/hanss/hanss.htm
- How can we die if we are not alive? – http://home.ntelos.net/~write/memes.html
- Internet Mind Virus Antidote – http://www.memecentral.com/antidote.htm
- “Journal of Memetics” by Bruce Edmonds – http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/, http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/
- Meme Central by Richard Brodie – http://www.memecentral.com/
- Meme Streets by Cade Metz (2003.12.30, PCMagazine) – http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1402907,00.asp
- MemeSpace – http://www.memes.org/
- Memecloud – Memes running around Alex Barnett’s cloud – http://www.memecloud.com
- Memento – http://www.memento.org
- Memes – Susan Blackmore – http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/
- Memes Page – http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/formerly-hyper-weird/memetics.html
- Memes: Introduction – http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMIN.html
- Memes: Self-Replicants or Mysticism? – http://hotwired.wired.com/braintennis/96/43/index0a.html
- Memesis Symposium – http://web.aec.at/meme/symp/
- Memetic Lexicon – http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Cultural/Memetics/meme_lex.html
- Memetics – http://memetics.chielens.net/
- Memetics – http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMES.html
- Memetics Publications on the Web – http://users.lycaeum.org/~sputnik/Memetics/index.html
- Memetics and Synthetic Intelligence Discussion Corner – http://databank.oxydex.com/m2.html
- Memetics: A Systems Metabiology – http://www.apocalypse.org/pub/u/rwhe/memetics.html
- Mind viruses in Russia – http://www.ussr.to/All/virus_star/index.html
- Neobiology & Ethetics – http://neobiology.earthsociety.org/
- Persistence of Memes – http://www.geocities.com/persistentmemes/articles.html
- Social Evolution – http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SOCEVOL.html
- Street Memes – http://www.streetmemes.com/
- Structure of Memes – http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMSTRUC.html
- The Church of Virus – http://www.lucifer.com/virus
- The Electric Meme – http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~rva20/EMeme.html
- The Generosity Virus – http://www.generosity.org/
- The Lucifer Principle – http://www.bookworld.com/lucifer/
- Toxic Memes (Plausibly Surreal – Scenarios and Anticipations) at /WorldChanging: Another World Is Here/ – http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/000757.html
- Toxic Memes – http://www.sjgames.com/transhuman/toxicmemes/“
- UK Memes Central – http://www.memes.org.uk/
- Unleashing the Ideavirus – http://www.ideavirus.com/
- Richard Dawkins – http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/
- alt.memetics resources – http://maxwell.lucifer.com/virus/alt.memetics/
- Jim Doran (1998) ‘Simulating Collective Misbelief’ – http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/1/1/3.html
- It appears that what the agents in a multiple agent system believe is typically partial, often wrong and often inconsistent, but that this may not be damaging to the system as a whole. Beliefs which are demonstrably wrong I call misbeliefs. Experiments are reported which have been designed to investigate the phenomenon of collective misbelief in artificial societies, and it is suggested that their results help us to understand important human social phenomena, notably ideologies.
- James Dow (2008) ‘Is Religion an Evolutionary Adaptation?’ – http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/11/2/2.html (Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation vol. 11, no. 2 2)
- Religious people talk about things that cannot be seen, stories that cannot be verified, and beings and forces beyond the ordinary. Perhaps their gods are truly at work, or perhaps in human nature there is an impulse to proclaim religious knowledge. If so, it would have to have arisen by natural selection. It is hard to imagine how natural selection could have produced such an impulse. There is a debate among evolutionary scientists about whether or not there is any adaptive advantage to religion at all (Bulbulia 2004a; Atran and Norenzayan 2004). Some believe that it has no adaptive value itself and that it is just a hodge podge of of behaviors that have evolved because they are adaptive in other non-religious contexts. The agent-based simulation described in this article shows that a central unifying feature of religion, a belief in an unverifiable world, could have evolved along side of verifiable knowledge. The simulation makes use of an agent-based communication model with two types of information: verifiable information (real information) about a real world and unverifiable information (unreal information) about about an imaginary world. It examines the conditions necessary for the communication of unreal information to have evolved along side the communication of real information. It offers support for the theory that religion is an adaptive complex and it disputes the theory that religion is a byproduct of unrelated adaptive processes.
- EvoGod – SciLab program to simulate the evolution of religion – http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/11/2/2/sim4.sce.html
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Michael Doebeli, Iaroslav Ispolatov: “A model for the evolutionary diversification of religions” (2008.10.01) – http://uk.arxiv.org/abs/0810.0296
- We address the problem of diversification in religions by studying selection on cultural memes that colonize humans hosts. In analogy to studying the evolution of pathogens or symbionts colonizing animal hosts, we use models for host-pathogen dynamics known from theoretical epidemiology. In these models, religious memes colonize individual humans. Rates of transmission of memes between humans, i.e., transmission of cultural content, and rates of loss of memes (loss of faith) are determined by the phenotype of the cultural memes, and by interactions between hosts carrying different memes. In particular, based on the notion that religion can lead to oppression of lower classes once a religious society has reached a certain size, we assume that the rate of loss increases as the number of humans colonized by a particular meme phenotype increases. This generates frequency-dependent selection on cultural memes, and we use evolutionary theory to show that this frequency dependence can generate the emergence of coexisting clusters of different meme types. The different clusters correspond to different religions, and hence our model describes the emergence of distinct descendent religions from single ancestral religions.
- “6 Insane Foreign Memes That Put Lolcats To Shame” by S. Peter Davis (Cracked.com; 2010.09.13) – http://www.cracked.com/article_18735_6-insane-foreign-memes-that-put-lolcats-to-shame.html
- “The 9 Most Obnoxious Memes to Ever Escape the Web” by David Knight (Cracked.com; 2008.05.15) – http://www.cracked.com/article_16248_9-most-obnoxious-memes-ever-escape-web.html
- Memetics (Wikipedia) – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
- “How Problem Solving and Neurotransmission in the Upper Paleolithic led to The Emergence and Maintenance of Memetic Equilibrium in Contemporary World Religions” – http://www.politicsandculture.org/2010/04/27/how-problem-solving-and-neurotransmission-in-the-upper-paleolithic-led-to-the-emergence-and-maintenance-of-memetic-equilibrium-in-contemporary-world-religions/
- “Two early meme papers of historical interest (1a)” (at memetics discussion list at http://cfpm.org/~majordom/memetics/) – http://cfpm.org/~majordom/memetics/2000/16177.html
More: Memetic diseases – https://eikonal.wordpress.com/2011/05/12/memetic-diseases/
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