"Memes" on Instagram and other social media platforms disguised as misleading and inaccurate health advice is the actual problem.
Looks like the word "Meme" in 2020 is now totally different to when it was used in 2006.
meme (n.)
"an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture," 1976, introduced by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene," coined by him from Greek sources, such as mimeisthai "to imitate" (see mime (n.)), and intended to echo gene.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/meme
Gene: from Greek genea "generation, race".
Saying "meme came out of gene" is a perfectly reasonable statement.
This applies similarly to low-truth-valence ideologies and belief systems, for which current and pending crises may prove strong checks.
The pop understanding robs ideas of their context in systems of ideas, rendering them isolated sound bites with no integration or higher level thought. It promotes a kind of Orwellian "duckspeak" and the utmost short attention span culture.
I don't think it's a coincidence that meme culture dominated forums originate all the worst ideas and culture on the Internet. I am looking at Twitter with its ideological lynch mobs, 4chan, and the popular Reddit forums.
Richard Dawkins originated the concept, and for him it was only a speculation anyway. In any case Dawkins has never impressed me. He's not the greatest thinker in evolutionary theory by any measure, and he's among a collection of people who lost their minds after 9/11. I have no idea why he is so high profile.
That’s essentially the extent of the analogy to genes and is basically self-evident.
Consider a mathematical "culture" where proofs are generated by some AI, propagated between nodes, and each node that receives a proof checks if it seems valid before propagating it to the next node.
What kind of proof survives that kind of culture has a lot more to do with the nature of mathematics and the proposer AI than it has to do with the dynamics that every replicator system has in common.
In other words, it's very easy for pop memetics to go back and forth between a position where "it's all replicators, the memes are just using you to replicate themselves" and where "obviously, the objective content of the idea matters more than their replicability".
How much the spread of ideas in a society is one compared to the other depends on parameters that differ from system to system. Treating them all alike does a big disservice to the grand variety of systems that exist, and using the concept of replicator dynamics to pretend that the intellect is always a servant to the system is worse still.
api is right that memetics as a field is in disrepute, considered pseudoscience by many. That doesn't mean the premise of ideas propagating through the population, surviving or dying based on various criteria, is totally bunk. But you have to be willing to distinguish the concept of memes from 'memetics as a science.' I think it's a useful analogy, but it has limitations.
One hazard of memetics mirrors a common hazard in discussions about genetics. Anthropomorphizing genes by saying things like "the gene wants to replicate" or "the gene is selfish" is common for obvious reasons, but you have to be careful to not take it literally. When you make the analogy between genes and ideas, that habit of anthropomorphization comes along for the ride, and in the process ideas are given agency of their own. Saying that the idea has agency of it's own, that it self-replicates, is in some sense tantamount to questioning the agency of the humans participating in the spread of the idea. In brief, memetics steps on the third rail of free will.
In practice now, memes are exactly what the GP says: manifestation of simpletons communicating on the Internet.
For example, if you just say, “that’s our culture,” it’s very tempting to accept it as an intrinsic property of your society/company/team. If you say, “that’s the collection of dominant memes for this particular environment at this particular time,” it gives you some avenues to start 1) decomposing a monolithic culture into its component pieces and 2) explore why those particular memes are so dominant in the particular environment.
The latter route, IMO, will expose many more levers for you to play with if you were to want to, say, modify a culture.
Memetics, or whatever you are willing to call it, is not. Mostly a way for people with frog avatars to sound important.
The coarse structure of known space resembles brain tissue when rendered in a certain way, therefore the universe is a giant brain.
I could go on forever.
Reason from first principles, not by analogy.
At a certain degree of chemical complexity, things start behaving like organisms, and in fact soon thereafter we just call those groupings/combinations of chemicals “organisms.”
The distillation to first principles is: anything that reproduces with some error then must compete for finite resources, where failure precludes propagation, will “evolve” toward higher fitness (given the particular context/environment).
This first principles explanation of evolution can be readily applied to ideas, thus: memetics. Memetics was not arrived at by analogy to genetics. Both were derived from the same first principles of replication and selection.
To really do that you would have to show that the brain works like a genetic/evolutionary system, and that does not appear to be the case (or at least we do not know enough to say that). There is so much context there. You can't just do superficial pattern recognition and then force fit an entire theoretical model. It's lazy.
I am not saying ideas are nothing like genes, just that they are not the same thing. You can't just steal theory from another field without context. Seriously... name one case in science where that has worked. Things are what they are, and not necessarily what they superficially look like when viewed from a certain angle and lots of details are ignored.
Also as I said the pop understanding of memes is far less interesting than Dawkins speculation and basically reduces ideas to isolated grunts. It's a form of "conceptual thought denialism."
I have no context here. What do you mean?