Page 1 Memetics papers on the web 26.08.2010 16:27:37 http://www.lycaeum.org/~sputnik/Memetics/Culture Jammer's Encyclopedia Memetics publications on the web: This site uses QBullets to mark links: This is an " http" link to an external web site This is a "mailto" link that will pop up an email form This links to a plain text file This links to a file hosted at this site Also, names in green mark frequently-cited authors, and green asterisks ( *) mark frequently-cited works A Åm, Onar " Critique and Defense of Memesis " Memesis Symposium (1996): "As of today memetics is very far from fulfilling the requirements of a science. But I think it is just a matter of time before most of these problems have been resolved." Antomarini, Brunella & Speel, Hans-Cees " Questions and Answers about Memetics " MONTAG (1996): Five questions and answers about memes, translated from an Italian book series. Aunger, Robert " A Report On The Conference "Do Memes Account For Culture?" Held At King's College, Cambridge" JOM:EMIT(1999) Aunger, Robert " Culture Vultures " The Sciences (1999): A review of Blackmore's The Meme Machine. B Baldassarre, Gianluca " Cultural evolution of "guiding criteria" and behaviour in a population of neural-network agents " JOM:EMIT(2001): "This work presents a computational model that investigates the nature and function of some forms of "guiding criteria" in the cultural evolution of a population of agents that learn and adapt to the environment using neural networks." Barbrook, Richard " Memesis Critique" Memesis Symposium (1996): "[I]f memes 'replicate themselves,' what are humans doing in the meantime?" Barbrook, Richard & Lynch, Aaron " Memes: Self-Replicants or Mysticism? " Wired(1996): A debate. Beer, Francis A. " A Review of: Evolutionary Paradigms in the Social Sciences " JOM:EMIT(1997): A special issue ofInternational Studies Quarterly Beer, Francis A. " Memetic Meanings" JOM:EMIT(1999): a commentary on Rose's "Controversies in Meme T heory" * Best, Michael L. " Models for Interacting Populations of Memes: Competition and Niche Behavior " JOM:EMIT(1997): "We make use of a set of text analysis tools, primarily based on Latent Semantic Indexing, to study the dymanics of memes on the Net [USENET]." Best, Michael L. " Memes on memes - a critique of memetic models " JOM:EMIT(1998): A critique of Lynch's "Units, events and dynamics in memetic evolution." Bilk, Mark S. " Dominator Culture" alt.memetic s resources (1995): The model for modern civilization "is a mind-virus... No one is given the choice to be infected - it has gone on from generation to generation, automatically, for at least five millennia." Bjarneskans, H. , Grønnevik, B. & Sandber g, A. " The Lifecycle of Memes" Transhumanist Resources : "To survive in a context the memes must meet certain conditions. We abstract a model of these conditions and use it to analyse three well-known memes: the 'Killroy was here' graffiti, urban legends and Christianity." Blackmore, Susan " Memes, Minds and Selves" About Biology seminar(1996): "I would say that selves are co-adapted meme complexes... Like religions, political belief systems and cults, they are safe havens for all sorts of travelling memes and they are protected from destruction by various meme-tricks." Blackmore, Susan " The Power of the Meme Meme" Skeptic (1997): "Without the theory of evolution by memetic selection nothing in the world of the mind makes much sense... Without memetics you can only fall back on appeals to an imaginary conscious agent." Blackmore, Susan " Waking from the Meme Dream" Int. Conf. on Buddhism, Science & Psychotherapy(1998): "Why do I say that the self is a meme-complex? Because it works the same way as other meme-complexes... [it] has a good reason for getting
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Druckrey, Tim " Dangerous Contagion" Telepolis (1996)
E
Edmonds, Bruce " On Modelling in Memetics" JOM:EMIT (1998): "The field of memetics is characterised and two types of
memetic model analysed: the a priori model and the 'black-box' model."
Elliot, Carl " A New Way to Be Mad" The Atlantic Monthly (2000): Discusses apotemnophilia as a possible "semantic
contagion."
Erwin, Greg " This is the Holy Salvation Meme" alt.memetics (1994): "It announces that you may be saved from eternal tortureand rewarded with infinite, eternal bliss by accepting its claims and affording it opportunities to replicate itself."
Evans, Lilly: see Price, If
Evers, John R. " A justification of societal altruism according to the memetic application of Hamilton's Rule " Principia
Cybernetica (1998): "Assuming acceptable criteria and empirical data can be established to give real meaning to the 'rate of
conversion' for any given meme, the memetic application of Hamilton's Rule offers a comprehensive justification for general
(intra-societal, or intra-cultural) altruism."
F
Felkins, Leon " Strolling Through the Memetic Mine Field" The Ethical Spectacle (1995): "I will give a brief introduction to how
the mind is influenced by memes and genes and give examples of the many memes that have great control over our lives."
Felkins, Leon " The Memes of Love, Sex and Marriage" (1995): "After a person has accepted that certain memes are enhancing
or interfering with their love life, that person should examine these memes under the microscope of rigid logic."
Fiore, Frank " Viral marketing" American City Business Journals (1999): "Viral marketing is like it sounds. Call it word-of-
mouth, spawning, self-propagation - organic."
Fog, Agner " Cultural r/k Selection" JOM:EMIT (1997): "A society dominated by external conflicts or war will evolve in a
direction called regal, whereas a society in a peaceful or sparsely populated area will evolve in the opposite direction, called
kalyptic."
Ford, Richard: see also Gordon, Sarah
Formoso, Joe " Memes, and Grinning Idiot Press: or, why I have been studying vampires since 1972" Grinning Idiot Press(1993): "They are in effect captives of coherent information systems which have subverted their ability to deliberate, to think ; they
are 'possessed' by what are called memes, information viruses."
Frank, Joshua " Applying Memetics to Financial Markets: Do Markets Evolve towards Efficiency?" JOM:EMIT (1999): "[M]ost
Finance literature inaccurately assumes that economic fitness would be the key variable in determining which memes prevail in the
evolutionary process..."
G
Gabora, Liane " Meme and Variations: A Computational Model of Cultural Evolution" Lectures in Complex Systems (1993):
"Ideas, like genomes, are patterns that evolve; however their evolution is not subject to the same constraints, and employs different
mechanisms."
Gabora, Liane " A Day in the Life of a Meme" The Nature, Representation and Evolution of Concepts (1996): "Since memes
do not contain instructions for their replication, our brains do it for them, strategically, guided by a fitness landscape that reflects
both internal drives and a worldview that forms through meme assimilation."
Gabora, Liane " Memes: The Creative Spark " Wired (1997): "Memetics appears not only to put us on the road to understanding
the pervasiveness, diversity, and adaptive complexity of the cultural debris that surrounds and infests us. It also yields unexpected
insight into creativity and spiritual matters that have mystified us since the first fledgling memes appeared in our ancestors' brains."
* Gabora, Liane " The Origin and Evolution of Culture and Creativity" JOM:EMIT (1997): "This paper presents a model for
how an individual becomes a meme-evolving agent via the emergence of an autocatalytic network of sparse, distributed
memories..."
Gabora, Liane " Autocatalytic Closure in a Cognitive System: A Tentative Scenario for the Origin of Culture" Psycoloquy
(1998): An autocatalytic process has been advanced to explain the origin of life; Gabora explores a model that uses this process toexplain the awakening of abstract thought in hominids.
Gabora, Liane " The Meme Machine JASSS: A review of Blackmore's The Meme Machine
Henson, H. Keith " Memes Meta-Memes and Politics" (1988): "The study of memetics takes the old saw about ideas having a life
of their own seriously and applies what we know about ecosystems, evolution, and epidemiology to study the spread and
persistence of ideas in cultures."
Heylighen, Francis " Evolution, Selfishness and Cooperation" Principia Cybernetica (1992): "In a following paper... a new
model will be proposed... based on the concept of a meme as replicating unit of cultural evolution. The present paper will mainly
set the stage..."
Heylighen, Francis " 'Selfish' Memes and the Evolution of Cooperation" Principia Cybernetica (1992): (appended to previous
paper) "A new, integrated model for the evolution of cooperation is proposed, based on the concept of a meme, as replicating unit
of culture."
Heylighen, Francis " Fitness as default: the evolutionary basis for cognitive complexity reduction" Principia Cybernetica (1992):
"[G]iven that knowledge consists of extremely simple models of an infinitely complex reality, how can we explain that knowledge
is still most of the time reliable? I will try to answer that question by linking the mechanism of default reasoning to the natural
selection of cognized phenomena."
Heylighen, Francis " Evolutionary Approach to Epistemology" Principia Cybernetica (1993): "Evolutionary epistemology is an
approach that sees knowledge in the first place as a product of the variation and selection processes characterizing evolution"
Heylighen, Francis " Memetics" Principia Cybernetica (1994): "A meme is defined as a cognitive-behavioral pattern that can be
transmitted from one individual to another one through communication."
Heylighen, Francis " Competition between Memes and Genes" Principia Cybernetica (1994): "It should not surprise us then that
during the last ten thousand years, humans have almost not changed on the genetic level, whereas their culture (i.e. the total set of memes) has undergone the most radical developments."
Heylighen, Francis " Structure of memes" Principia Cybernetica (1994): Describes two models that may be useful in describing
the ways memes work.
Heylighen, Francis & Campbell, Donald " Selection of Organization at the Social Level: obstacles and facilitators of
metasystem transitions" World Futures: J. General Evolution (1995): "A group... can be seen as the physical counterpart of
'sociotype' of a cognitive belief pattern of 'memotype'..."
Heylighen, Francis " Knowledge Selection Criteria" Principia Cybernetica (1995): "Whereas traditional epistemologies try to
distinguish 'true' knowledge from 'false' knowledge... in an evolutionary context we must admit that many different influences
impinge on the evolution of knowledge."
Heylighen, Francis " Memetic Selection Criteria" Principia Cybernetica (1995): Describes several criteria that, when met by a
meme, make that meme more successful.
Heylighen, Francis " Evolution of Memes on the Network: from chain-letters to the global brain " Ars Electronica Catalogue
(1996): "The corresponding 'organism' or sociotype for this meme network would be the whole of humanity... Individual humans
would play a role similar to the organism's cells."
Heylighen, Francis " In defense of 'Memesis'" Memesis Symposium (1996): "[M]ost of the criticisms of the 'Memesis' text strike
me as based on misunderstandings of what concepts like 'evolution' and 'memes' really mean."
Heylighen, Francis " What makes a meme successful? Selection criteria for cultural evolution" Proc. 15th Int. Congress on
Cybernetics (1998): "Meme replication is described as a 4-stage process, consisting of assimilation, retention, expression and
transmission."
Heylighen, Francis " The necessity of theoretical constructs: a rebuttal of the behaviourist approach to memetics" JOM:EMIT
(1999): A commentary on Gatherer's "Why the 'Thought Contagion' Metaphor is Retarding the Progress of Memetics."
Hoberman, Perry " Mutant Memes 1.1: A prelude to a discussion of memesis" Memesis Symposium (1996): "I would suggest
that we slow down and clear up some fairly serious misconceptions about the term 'meme' before it too gets totally lost among the
wreckage."
Hrachovec, Herbert " Maiming Memes" Memesis Symposium (1996): "Taking the suggested analogy at face value one would
have to discuss problems arising from the uncritical transfer of categories appropriate to the working of proteins to the description
of human capabilities."
Hull, David L. " Strategies in Meme Theory" JOM:EMIT (1999): a commentary on Rose's "Controversies in Meme Theory"
I/J
Jacobson, Rogan " Bridging the gap: Memetics as a methodological tool to close the ranks between social and traditional
Marsden, Paul " Memetics and Social Contagion: Two Sides of the Same Coin?" JOM:EMIT (1998): "[P]roposing a memetic
theory of social contagion, arguing that social contagion research and memetics are indeed two sides of the same social
epidemiological coin, and end[ing] with a call for their synthesis into a comprehensive body of theoretically informed research."
Marsden, Paul " A Strategy for Memetics: Memes as Strategies" JOM:EMIT (1999): A commentary on Gatherer's "Why the
'Thought Contagion' Metaphor is Retarding the Progress of Memetics."
Marsden, Paul " Castles in the Sky JASSS : A review of Lynch's Thought Contagion
Marsden, Paul " Forefathers of Memetics: Gabriel Tarde and the Laws of Imitation" JOM:EMIT (2000): "[A] century ago, one
of the founding fathers of sociology, Gabriel Tarde, outlined a programme for sociology... that has much in common with this
memetic project...."
Marsden, Paul " Is Suicide Contagious? A Case Study in Applied Memetics" JOM:EMIT (2001): "The phenomenon of suicide
contagion is demonstrated experimentally. An interpretation of the results is proposed using an understanding of memetics as
contagion psychology informed by selectionist thinking."
Marsden, Paul " Letter: Copycat Terrorism: Fanning the Fire" JOM:EMIT (2001): "The political and media reaction to the recent
terrorist attacks in the US could trigger a spate of copycat terrorism."
Marshall, Garry " The Internet and Memetics" Principia Cybernetica (1998): "Memetics provides a unified framework for
examining the overall behavior of the Internet and its users."
Mason, Kelby " Thoughts as Tools: The Meme in Daniel Dennett's Work " Principia Cybernetica (1998): "I... focus specifically
on the claim that memetics is reductionistic... Next I disucss the apparent threat of memetics to humanity's self-image, and finallysome genuine problems posed by Dennett's treatment of memetics."
Matteo, Sante " Blood and Memes on the Marciapiede: Memetics and Migration" Italian Studies in Southern Africa (1995):
"Human ideas, beliefs, institutions, and behavior, at least to some extent, are caused by and are merely vehicles for blind self-
replicating bits of thought: memes."
Medawar, Sir Peter " The Future of Man" (1959): "I shall discuss the origin in human beings of a new, a non-genetical, system
of heredity and evolution based upon certain properties and activities of the brain."
Mikiten, Terry: see Salingaros, Nikos
Miotto, Paola: see Preti, Antonio
Modelski, George " Evolutionary Paradigm for Global Politics" International Studies Quarterly (1996): "[T]he institutions of world politics evolve, that is they undergo change subject to identifiable evolutionary processes."
Modelski, George " An evolutionary theory of culture?" JOM:EMIT (1999): a commentary on Rose's "Controversies in Meme
Theory"
Monod, Jacques " Chance and necessity" (1971): "For a biologist it is tempting to draw a parallel between the evolution of ideas
and that of the biosphere." (brief excerpt)
* Moritz, Elan " Memetic Science: I- General Introduction" (1990): "This paper presents a rigorous foundation for discussion of
memes and approaches to quantifying relevant aspects of meme genesis, interaction, mutation, growth, death and spreading
processes."
Moritz, Elan " MetaSystem Transitions, Memes, and Cybernetic Immortality" World Futures (1993)
N/O
O'Hear, Anthony " Infection of the meme machine" Associated Newspapers (1999): A review of Blackmore's The Meme
Machine.
Olney, T.J. " An Alternative Approach to Gender and Consumer Behavior: Memetics" Gender and Consumer Behavior
Conference (1998)
Owlglass, Nancy " The Reasons for the Unexpected Difficulties of Modern Life" Disumbrationist League Bulletin (1998):
"Ideas that serve us - memes that tend to increase the reproductive success of the host organism - have an obvious edge. And that's
good for us. But ideas that serve themselves first will always win out in the final count."
P
Preti, Antonio & Miotto, Paola " Creativity, Evolution and Mental Illness" JOM:EMIT (1997): "Studies on the link between
creativity and mental illnesses show that it is exactly the characteristics of the mental disorder which also confer some advantage
Price, If & Evans, Lilly " Punctuated Equilibrium: An Organic Model for the Learning Organization" Forum (1993): "[W]e find
metaphors from biology and geology particularly appropriate to capture the essence of the learning organization."
Price, If " Organizational Memetics?: Organizational Learning as a Selection Process" Management Learning (1995): "Whereas
an organism is a creation of natural replicators, genes, an organization can be seen as a product of an alternative replicator, the
meme or mental model, acting, like a gene, to preserve itself in an Evolutionary Stable System."
Price, If & Shaw, Ray " The Learning Organization Meme: Emergence of a Management Replicator" Proceedings 3rd ECLO
Conf. (1996): "This paper illustrates the increasing returns dynamic in the evolution of management recipes by contrasting
Business Process Re-engineering and the Learning Organization."
Price, If " Punctuating Organizational Equilibrium: Shifting the patterns that limit" Critical Linkages Newsletter (1997)
Price, If & Kennie, Tom " Punctuated Strategic Equilibrium and some Strategic Leadership Challenges for University 2000"
2nd Int. Conf. on the Dynamics of Strategy (1997): "[T]he metaphor of the organization as an organism [is replaced] with the literal
assertion that both social organizations and organisms are classes of complex systems maintained, and specified by, replicators."
Price, If & Shaw, Ray " Memetics and the Edge of Chaos" JOM:EMIT (1999): A response to Paul Marsden's review of Price's &
Shaw's Shifting the Patterns.
Price, If " Steps toward the Memetic Self " JOM:EMIT (1999): a commentary on Rose's "Controversies in Meme Theory"
Pyper, Hugh S. " The Selfish Text: The Bible and Memetics" The Bible into Culture Colloquium (1997): "[T]he proposition that
this paper will discuss: western culture is the bible's way of making more bibles."
Q/R
Reader, Simon M. & Laland, Kevin N. " Do Animals Have Memes?" JOM:EMIT (1999): "[I]mitation is simply one mechanism
of transmitting acquired information between individuals. As long as information is transmitted with sufficient fidelity to be
replicated in the brain of the receiver, any social learning process will do."
Reynolds, Robert G., Whallon, Robert and Goodhall, Steven " Transmission Of Cultural Traits By Emulation: An Agent-
Based Model Of Group Foraging Behavior" JOM:EMIT (2001): "[W]e are concerned whether the emergence of human culture
provided humans with an adaptive advantage over non-human primate counterparts in terms of hunter-gathering capabilities."
Ritt, Nikolaus " Language Change as Evolution: Looking for Linguistic 'Genes'": "[T]he items of which languages are made up
do not primarily exist 'because of' the purposes they serve their speakers, but simply because they have managed to replicate
sufficiently well."
* Rose, Nick " Controversies in Meme Theory" JOM:EMIT (1998): "Four areas of meme theory are critically reviewed. These
are ambiguity in the definition of a meme and convusion regarding the distinction between replicator and phenotype, the problem
of inheritance of acquired characteristics, the relationship between memetics and sociobiology, and the selection or mutation of
memes being carried out by conscious foresight."
Rose, Nick " Okay, but exactly 'who' would escape the Tyranny of the Replicators?" JOM:EMIT (1999): A reply to commentaries
on "Controversies in Meme Theory."
Ross, Stephen E. " "Memes" as Infectious Agents in Psychosomatic Illness" Annals of Internal Medicine (1999): "Some disease
conceptions appear to induce illness in the absence of any classic pathogen. These psychosomatic memes induce biological,
psychological, and social changes in their hosts and can be transmitted to others."
Rothstein, Edward " "Memes" Spreading Rapidly Across Web" New York Times (1996): Informal article introducing memetheory.
Runiciman, W. " Darwinian Soup" (1999): A review of Blackmore's The Meme Machine.
Rushkoff, Douglas " Ways and Memes" Memesis Symposium (1996): "The meme that's gotten me in the most trouble is the
meme meme itself."
S
NEW Salingaros, Nikos & Mikiten, Terry " Darwinian Processes and Memes in Architecture: A Memetic Theory of Modernism"
JOM:EMIT (2001)
Sandberg, A.: See Bjarneskans, H.Shalizi, Cosma " How to Catch Insanity from Your Kids (Among Others); or, Histoire naturelle de l'infame" (1996): A review of
Dan Sperber's Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach
Shaviro, Steven " Language is a Virus From Outer Space" Doom Patrols (1995): Discusses William S. Burroughs' theories of
viral language: "Strands of alien DNA unfurl themselves in our brains, just as tapeworms unfurl themselves in our guts."
Shaw, Ray: see Price, If
Sherman, Tom " The New Protozoans?" Memesis Symposium (1996): "All this constant modeling, remodeling and over-coding
of nature: maybe this obsessive modeling of nature is our species' strategy for survival?"
Siegfried, André " The Spreading of Germs and Ideas" Germs and Ideas: Routes of Epidemics and Ideologies (1958): "There is
a striking parallel between the spreading of germs and the spreading of ideas or propaganda."
Silby, Brent " Memecosystems: Are animal minds suitable habitats for memes?" (2000): "I believe that the British tit's [milk-
bottle opening] behavior has been misinterpreted as memetic.... [T]he question of memes in animal minds should be considered on
a case by case basis."
Silby, Brent " What is a Meme?" (2000): "As its success increases, memetics will take over where psychology has left off, and
will become a driving force in the study of human behavior."
Silby, Brent " Evolution of Technology: Exposing the Myth of Creative Design" (2000): "[T]echnological artifacts are not the
result of creative thought - rather, the creative process can more accurately be described as the execution of an evolutionary
algorithm."
Simonyi, Charles: see Godwin, Mike
Skoyles, John R.: see Vaneechoutte, MarioSpeel, Hans-Cees " Memetics: On a conceptual framework for cultural evolution" Evolution of Complexity Symposium (1995):
"The aim of this paper is to present a conceptual framework for the selective memetic evolution of strategies belonging to large
organizations."
Speel, Hans-Cees " A short comment from a biologist on William Benzon's essay 'Culture as an Evolutionary Arena'" J Social &
Evolutionary Systems (1996): "In this short reply, I shall present ideas formed in biological theory with regard to the meme-gene
analogy."
Speel, Hans-Cees " A Memetic Framework for the Analysis of Policy Formation" Organizing in a Multivoiced World (1997):
"[A] framework is presented for the analysis of policy processes according to the evolutionary paradigm."
Speel, Hans-Cees " Memes are also Interactors" 15th Int. Cong. on Cybernetics (1998): "I argue that if we can and do judge
memes by their merits without necessary interference of the physical world, which implies a kind of phemotype or conceptualphenotype, memes should count as interactors."
Speel, Hans-Cees " On Memetics and Memes as Brain-Entities" JOM:EMIT (1999): A commentary on Gatherer's "Why the
'Thought Contagion' Metaphor is Retarding the Progress of Memetics."
Speel, Hans-Cees " Rationale for Commentary on Rose's Paper: Controversies in Meme Theory" JOM:EMIT (1999)
Speel, Hans-Cees: see also Antomarini, Brunella
Sperber, Dan " An objection to the memetic approach to culture" Darwinizing Culture (2000): "Memeticists have to give
empirical evidence to support the claim that, in the micro-processes of cultural transmission, elements of culture inherit all or
nearly all their relevant properties from other elements of culture that they replicate."
Sutphen, Dick " The Battle for Your Mind: Persuasion and Brainwashing Techniques Being Used on the Public Today " (1995).
Szamado, Szabolcs " Basic Questions in Memetics: Life-Cycle, Reproduction and Resources" (1998)
Szpir, Michael " Mind Viruses" American Scientist (1995): A summary of meme theory.
T/U
Taylor, James R.: see Giroux, Hélène
Twain, Mark: see Clemens, Samuel
V
Vajk, J. Peter " Memetics: The nascent science of ideas and their transmission" (1989)
VanArsdale, Daniel W. " Chain Letter Evolution" (1998): "Our collection supports the view of chain letters as a 'mind virus'...
they may now help us comprehend the generality and inexhaustible opportunism of evolution."