What's your meme

[tyred]

I was looking for my other sock last week until I realised I was already wearing it. In my defence I was a bit jet lagged.

It's worse when you put both socks on the same foot and can't work out where the other one is

 

[winjim]

But I had to pick one, as the question asked for a single meme. The concept "religion" isn't a meme, nor is "all religions" a meme. Each religion is a meme, so I had to choose.

And I picked the one that is endemic in the UK and I was raised in, because if I picked any other one it might have given the impression that I thought Christianity wasn't a meme, but Islam (for example) was.

Turns out whichever one I picked would be met with suspicion

Religion generally and Christianity specifically are not really memes themselves. Rather they are the product of the actions of many memes. They are analogous to the phenotype of an organism in the way that the collection of memes producing them is analogous to the genotype. One could call it the memotype I suppose.

One can trace, or at least have an idea of tracing, the evolution of religion and religions in the same way one can trace the evolution of species. Taking Christianity as your example, we probably began worshipping the sun and the moon, the earth, the seasons etc. Things which have a direct impact on our hunting or farming or whatever. Through the action of memes, heritable mutatable units of cultural information, this evolved into various types of polytheism, then monotheism. Eventually this monotheism mutated into Judaism. Then this Jesus fellow came along, mutated the memes of Judaism and introduced a bunch of his own, which were themselves mutated by his followers to produce the religion of Christianity. Remember that Christianity is only one of many iron age messianic sects of Judaism, it just happens to have the particular memotype which has enabled it to evolve, grow and flourish.

Some of these Christian memes were then merged with the memes from other Middle Eastern religions, Zoroastrianism and so forth, to produce Islam. The memes within Christianity continue to mutate so that we now have various forms analogous to sub-species, Catholicism, Protestantism, Anglicanism etc. Islam has evolved Sunni and Shia variants amongst others.

So I see religion as analogous to something like a family or genus, specific religions to a species, and schisms and sects to a sub-species. A meme in this context is an idea propagated within the religion, such as the creation myth or the great flood, which are shared by many religions, or the Nicene creed which is specifically Christian.

ETA: In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins uses the example of celibacy as a religious meme. If of course confers no advantage with regard to the survival and reproduction of the individual and their genes, but is a very culturally strong idea helping to spread the influence of the religion.

 

[Tin Pot]

Religion generally and Christianity specifically are not really memes themselves. Rather they are the product of the actions of many memes. They are analogous to the phenotype of an organism in the way that the collection of memes producing them is analogous to the genotype. One could call it the memotype I suppose.

One can trace, or at least have an idea of tracing, the evolution of religion and religions in the same way one can trace the evolution of species. Taking Christianity as your example, we probably began worshipping the sun and the moon, the earth, the seasons etc. Things which have a direct impact on our hunting or farming or whatever. Through the action of memes, heritable mutatable units of cultural information, this evolved into various types of polytheism, then monotheism. Eventually this monotheism mutated into Judaism. Then this Jesus fellow came along, mutated the memes of Judaism and introduced a bunch of his own, which were themselves mutated by his followers to produce the religion of Christianity. Remember that Christianity is only one of many iron age messianic sects of Judaism, it just happens to have the particular memotype which has enabled it to evolve, grow and flourish.

Some of these Christian memes were then merged with the memes from other Middle Eastern religions, Zoroastrianism and so forth, to produce Islam. The memes within Christianity continue to mutate so that we now have various forms analogous to sub-species, Catholicism, Protestantism, Anglicanism etc. Islam has evolved Sunni and Shia variants amongst others.

So I see religion as analogous to something like a family or genus, specific religions to a species, and schisms and sects to a sub-species. A meme in this context is an idea propagated within the religion, such as the creation myth or the great flood, which are shared by many religions, or the Nicene creed which is specifically Christian.

ETA: In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins uses the example of celibacy as a religious meme. If of course confers no advantage with regard to the survival and reproduction of the individual and their genes, but is a very culturally strong idea helping to spread the influence of the religion.

Which marked the decline of Dawkins as a useful academic.

 

[jefmcg]

@winjim thanks for the fulsome response. I am recovering from jetlag and influenza (I keep calling it that to make it clear it's the actual disease, not (wo)man-flu) so it's way to fulsome for me to read - let alone respond to - right now. Sorry! I'll catch up in the next few days. In the meantime, I will dart in and out posting a paragraph or two on dozens of threads. As long as it doesn't require more than a minute of focused attention.

 

[winjim]

@winjim thanks for the fulsome response. I am recovering from jetlag and influenza (I keep calling it that to make it clear it's the actual disease, not (wo)man-flu) so it's way to fulsome for me to read - let alone respond to - right now. Sorry! I'll catch up in the next few days. In the meantime, I will dart in and out posting a paragraph or two on dozens of threads. As long as it doesn't require more than a minute of focused attention.

Yeah sorry about the loser length post and possible egg-sucking lessons, it's a subject I find quite interesting. Go and rest, flu (and by that I mean actual flu) is horrid.

 

[winjim]

And Dawkins is a nobber daffodil....

That may or may not be the case, but it's very difficult to have a discussion about memes without at least mentioning him.

A video exists of Dawkins being interviewed about Darwin. The interviewer lists some of Darwin's less attractive qualities and asks Dawkins why he would possibly want to follow such a person. Dawkins replies along the lines that Darwin's qualities as a man are utterly irrelevant to his scientific discoveries so it doesn't really matter at all in terms of understanding and appreciating the theory of evolution.

 

[jefmcg]

This turned up in my fb ..

+ comments ....

1. Tom Stewart of course, if you want to roast lamb, you can release a new Samsung
2. Romilly Cocking And if you want to dream of Electric sheep, release a new Android