Below is a copy of an invited executive summary and abstract of my recent
paper, "Units, Events, and Dynamics in Memetic Evolution." The summary will
appear in an upcoming issue of the journal _Complexity._ The article it
summarizes is already published at the _Journal of Memetics_,
http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1998/vol2/lynch_a.html. Following the
summary is an abstract and table of contents for the paper.

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Executive Summary: 
Units, Events, and Dynamics in Memetic Evolution
by Aaron Lynch

The idea of exporting the theoretical and empirical successes of
evolutionary biology to the study of culture has attracted scientists for
over a century now. In recent decades, much of the attention has focused on
generalizing the evolutionary replicator theory to cover neurally stored
information much as genetic evolution theory covers the realm the
information stored in nucleic acids. In the last chapter of his 1976 book,
_The Selfish Gene_, Zoologist Richard Dawkins illustrated some of the
parallels by asserting that cultural evolution could be analyzed in terms
of replicating units analogous to the biochemical units known as "genes."
Thus, he coined the word "meme" to denote an item of information that
replicates brain to brain rather than molecule to molecule. 

A popular interest in memes followed, but Dawkins did not wish to shift his
focus away from biology to offer guidance to the growing crowd of people
interested in memes. As a result, some of the writings developed over the
years have mixed contagious euphoria with conceptual weakness, providing an
unfortunate vaccination against the meme concept among many scientists.
Most of those scientists recognize that strong theories cannot flow from
neologisms and analogies alone. New terminology must be given specific,
formal, and technical definitions without any embedded confusions. The
quantitative aspects of the theory must be shown to be expressible in
mathematical terms, and a basis for incorporating theory into computer
simulations should be provided. Only then will the theory offer researchers
an objective means for proceeding with the kind of empirical investigations
that lead to falsification or validation. 

My recent paper _Units, Events, and Dynamics in Memetic Evolution_
addresses exactly these concerns. The term "meme" is given a technical
definition in terms of abstractions, or sameness criteria, about brain
memory content. A system of event diagrams covers a wide range of
phenomena, such as beliefs that affect numbers of offspring per host, child
inculcation rates per host, peer conversions per host, dropout rates, etc.
This paves the way for simulating the memetic evolution of populations with
programs such as SWARM from the Santa Fe Institute. Event rate parameters
also lead to an expandable system of nonlinear equations describing the
propagation of a meme against its alternatives. The overall paper presents
meme theory in non-metaphoric terms that could in principle have preceded
the work of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin. This shows that the theory
depends no more inherently on metaphor than did early Darwinism, which
incorporated metaphors to the cultural practice of inheritance. 

As I argued in _Thought Contagion_ (Basic Books, 1996), memetic evolution
theory offers a broadly unifying explanation for the ideologies of
religion, sex, family, politics, business, health, and so forth. The
current paper lays a conceptual groundwork for moving these applications to
the next level scientific research. It is published at the new Journal of
Memetics, at 
http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1998/vol2/lynch_a.html.

_______________________________________________
CONTENTS AND ABSTRACT:

Units, Events and Dynamics in Memetic Evolution

1  - Introduction
2  - Non-Metaphoric Memetics
3  - Units of Memory Replication
4  - Other Propagating Items
5  - Representing Mnemons Symbolically
6  - Complementary Mnemons
7  - Mnemon Combinations
8  - Competing Mnemons
9  - Homogenic and Heterogenic Events
10 - Meme, Concisely Defined
11 - Stemming the Tide of Expanded Definitions
12 - Meme Sizes
13 - Massively Cooperative Propagation
14 - Centralized Communication
15 - The Fundamental Role of Abstraction in Science
16 - Population Memetics
17 - Qualitative and Quantitative Evolution
18 - Falsifiability
19 - Other Empirical Issues
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
References

ABSTRACT:
An evolutionary recursive replicator theory of mental/brain information is
presented. With all replicator theories resting at least tacitly upon the
fundamental notions of causation and of calling two or more entities "the
same" with respect to an abstraction, the concept is rendered explicit in
defining the terms "mnemon" and "meme". It is argued that memetics may have
no "absolute" system of memory abstractions much as physics has no absolute
coordinate system (framework of space-time abstractions). A symbolic
calculus of mnemon conjugations and replication events is introduced. The
term "meme" is given a technical definition, and reasons are offered for
avoiding more expansive definitions. Arguments that meme sets are generally
only partially ordered then provide a formal reason for rejecting mnemon
"size" as a crucial element in defining the word "meme". Differential
equations are developed for meme host population versus time in a two-meme
system, modeling the dynamics whereby events at the individual level give
rise to trends at the population level. This lays a foundation for
computerized simulations and the falsification or validation of specific
memetic hypotheses, and for testing population memetics theory with animal
experiments. As memetic hypotheses generally involve observable
communication events, they are found to have stronger empirical standing
than hypotheses involving unidentified genes. Mechanisms of creativity as a
population phenomenon are examined, with memetic analysis yielding a novel
explanation for the temporal clustering of independent co-creations.
Creation and propagation are integrated into a theory of evolution by
variation and natural selection of memes.

Published at Journal of Memetics,
http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1998/vol2/lynch_a.html.

(Two known typos in the paper are noted at
http://www.mcs.net/~aaron/UEDerrata_addenda.html.) 


  --Aaron Lynch

Author, THOUGHT CONTAGION:
How Belief Spreads Through Society--The New Science of Memes
Thought Contagion Memetics Page:
http://www.mcs.net/~aaron/thoughtcontagion.html




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