Introduction

Memes, as optimons, are involved in a natural selection in their own specific venue: that of human culture. They can act in concert with or in opposition to genes, and they can coevolve with each other or with genes. However, these facts do not explain the actual methods memes employ to induce adherents to spread them. The two questions that must be asked are, Why do memes spread? and How do memes spread?

Why Memes Spread

This is the easier of the two questions, and in general it has already been answered implicitly. Memes spread because they are replicators, or entities that are capable of being copied - in this case, through the mechanism of human minds repeating them. The force behind their spread, as well as their relative frequencies, is natural selection: the memes that are most effective at getting themselves copied and adopted are those that will come to be most prevalent in the meme pool. Memes also group together in mutually beneficial associations called meme sets, which promote the replication of all the memes in the set by reinforcing each other in the adherent's mind.

How Memes Spread

This is, without a doubt, the more difficult of the two questions and the one that requires more thought, consideration, and analysis. It is clear that memes change in frequency through natural selection, but it is not clear what methods they use or techniques they employ to get themselves spread. A number of different methods have been identified by Aaron Lynch in his book Thought Contagion, an excellent overview of memes' spread from which the following discussion has been derived and adapted. (See below.)

According to Lynch, "a single idea has a propagative profile" (Thought Contagion, p. 9) that details its specific strengths and weaknesses in several major areas of meme spread. He goes on to state, "Memetic theory analyzes these propagative profiles in a manner resembling that used in epidemiology." In effect, memetics analyzes the implementation of the following types of propagation by various memes.

Parental Transmission

The first and most obvious method of memetic transmission is that from parent to child. Children are especially likely to adopt and retain the ideas of their parents, so this is a logical (if slow) method of memetic trnasmission. Many religions propagate in this way (as well as utilizing other modes of transmission) - children have an overwhelming tendency to keep the religion of their parents; when they do change religions, it is often only from one sect to another and not to a radically different religion. Lynch distinguishes between two types of parental transmission: "quantity parental", which encourages hosts to have more children than they normally woluld (p.3), and "efficiency parental", which increases the children's likelihood of adopting the meme (p.4). Parental transmission is a type of vertical transmission, or transmission from older to younger generations (generally parent or other relative to child or other juvenile).

Proselytic Transmission

Memes propagate fastest through what Lynch calls "proselytic transmission," which is one form of horizontal transmission (the transmission of memes between peers). Any idea that spreads by encouraging its adherents to tell it to others has an advantage in proselytic transmission. For example, a meme held by some Christians states that telling others about Christianity is a good deed that can increase the chances of getting to heaven (thus relying on another companion meme). This meme has great proselytic power and encourages vigorous spread of the meme through an adherent's group of acquaintances. Spread by proselytism often succeeds by acting on common fears or on virtually universal other memes.

Preservational Mode

Some memes utilize a specific type of strategy dubbed the "preservational mode" (p. 6) by Aaron Lynch. Memes that are advantaged in this area tend to encourage adherents to remain adherents. Methods of doing so range from memes that encourage long life (such as memes for good health) to memes that threaten penalties for abandoning them (such as cult leaders threatening ex-cult members). Other memes encourage preservation of the meme in spite of subsequent contradiction by extolling the virtues of "faith" in the meme or meme set (common to many major religions).

Adversative Mode: Sabotage

Lynch categorizes "ideas that influence their hosts to attack or sabotage competing movements" as having advantages in the "adversative mode" of replication (p. 7). When carried to the point of killing adherents of alternative memes, this strategy can serve to increase the meme's relative proportion of adherents. It can also serve as a shock mechanism or attention-getter, such as in abortion-clinic bombings.

Motivational Mode

Lynch also recognizes the "motivational mode" of meme retention: "people adopt or retain an idea . . . because they expect to be better off as hosts than as nonhosts" (p. 8). This idea brings to mind the old argument of Pascal's Wager: "God is a reasonable bet" because, if God does exist, one will have believed and will therefore be admitted to heaven. Anyone who accepts this argument is accepting it from the motivational mode of meme transmission: they expect to be better off (allowed into heaven) as hosts than as nonhosts (condemned to hell) if it turns out that God exists.

Cognitive Mode

Lynch also recognizes a final mode of transmission called the "cognitive mode." If one chooses to define all ideas, including proven or empirically confirmed facts, as memes, then this idea also is a method of meme transmission. However, Lynch acknowledges that "the cognitively propagated idea 'is propagated' rather than 'propagates itself'" (p. 8). Memes that have advantages in this area do not need specific strategies for spread; they simply predicate on previously accepted notions of proof and fact. Of course, it is common for adherents of other memes - especially those with strong advantages in the preservational mode - to deny cognitively spread memes on the basis of their status as adherents of prior memes. One example of this phenomenon is some fundamentalists' refusal to accept the idea that the Earth is round because their religious books or writings stipulate a flat Earth. The same argument extends to creationists' denial of evolution.

Credits and Acknowledgements

The memetic classifications presented above are derived from those presented in Aaron Lynch's book Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society. All examples given are original. This material has been adapted with the kind permission of Aaron Lynch.

Looking Further: Links and References

These links and references are useful in the study of memes and their methods of transmission.

• Books
  • The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
  • The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins
  • Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society by Aaron Lynch
  • The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore
  • Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by Richard Brodie
  • Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

• Websites
  • Thought Contagion Science by Aaron Lynch
  • Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
  • Memetics Resources
  • Meme Central
  • Viruses of the Mind by Richard Dawkins
  • Memetics from Principia Cybernetica Web

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