From: hkhenson@cup.portal.com (H Keith Henson)
Newsgroups: alt.cyberspace
Subject: Re: MEMES (was: RE: Cybrspc Grvty, Def of Cybrspc)
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 93 20:29:50 PST
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Distribution: world

(Friend of mine pointed me to this discussion.)
---
William C. Hulley writes:

>rez, can you or someone else point me to something more formal on memes 
>and memetics. i am having some trouble figuring out if this "theory" is a
>real set of tools that we can use to recon cspace or just a distraction.

Staying within Dawkins' definition, a meme is a replicating 
information pattern.  To differentiate a meme from an idea, an idea 
which you have but never pass to another person is at most a potential 
meme.  It's "memetic essence" show up as it spreads out to more minds 
(or computers, or pages in books, or . . . .)  

So, computer viruses fall within this definition of a meme, but so do 
copies of Word Perfect, and urban legions.  A successful meme (by 
definition one which exists in a lot of copies) subverts its hosts to 
the minimal extent that they pass it to other potential hosts.  Memes 
range from helpful symbiotes to really nasty parasites.  In people the 
range is from information on how to make shoes to the kind of 
infectious craziness that induced Jim Jones and Co. to kill 
themselves.  In computers it ranges form the destructive computer 
virus to all those shareware programs. 

I have written a good fraction of the total on memes, but it has never 
been put together in a book.  An early and much reprinted article was 
in Analog in Aug of '87.  Will post one or two others here. 

Keith Henson

PS re the net, successful memes are the ones you can find in any 
archive.  And remember, meme = replicating information pattern.  
(Memetics is the study of memes and their interaction with their 
carriers.)
[This thing was finished three or four years ago and has become kind 
of dated.  Sorry, I am just to busy at the moment to update it. 1/92]

                          Memes Meta-Memes and Politics
 
                               By H. Keith Henson
 
 
    "For philosophically committed people, politics is primarily a 
contest over public policy.  The measure is not what people, but what 
ideas win." 
                                                 --Morton C. Blackwell
 
   "If you would understand politics, study evolution first."
                                                 --H. T. Watcher
 
 
   Richard Dawkins, perhaps the foremost evolutionary biologist of our 
times, starts Chapter 5 of his recent book, The Blind Watchmaker with 
"It's raining DNA outside."  He goes on to describe a willow tree that is 
shedding fluffy seeds far and wide across the landscape.  The paragraph 
ends:  "The whole performance, cotton wool, catkins, tree and all is in 
aid of one thing and one thing only, the spreading of DNA around the 
countryside.  Not just any DNA, but DNA whose coded characters spell out 
specific instructions for building willow trees that will shed a new 
generation of downy seeds.  Those fluffy specks are, literally, spreading 
instructions for making themselves. They are there because their 
ancestors succeeded in doing the same.  It is raining instructions out 
there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading 
algorithms. That's not a metaphor, it is the plain truth.  It couldn't be 
any plainer if it were raining floppy disks." 
 
   The paradigm of life as the propagation of genetic information and of 
Darwinian evolution as resulting from the selective survival generation 
after generation of some part of that information is an outgrowth of the 
computer age. This paradigm has led to a number of remarkable advances in 
evolutionary biology.  For example, seemingly "altruistic" behavior of 
worker bees is now understood as a consequence of the improved survival 
of the "selfish" DNA they share with the queen.  About a decade ago in 
the mind of the same Dr. Dawkins this line of thinking led to a new way 
to view the spread and persistence of the ideas that make up human 
culture. 
 
   The new study is called memetics after "meme" (which rhymes with 
cream). "Meme" is a coined word from a Greek root for memory, and 
purposefully similar to "gene."  Dawkins devoted the last chapter of his 
earlier book, The Selfish Gene, to defining memes and discussing the 
survival of these replicating information patterns within the meme-pool 
(roughly culture).  "Meme" is close to "idea," but not all ideas are 
memes.  An idea which fails to propagate beyond the person who first 
thinks of it is not a meme.  "Beliefs," especially organized and promoted 
beliefs, are memes, or, depending on how you think about them, 
cooperating groups of memes.  I will use memes, ideas, replicating 
information patterns, and beliefs as similar terms in this article. 
 
   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.  If you come to understand memetics, I expect your view of 
politics, religions, and related social movements to be changed in much 
the same way the germ theory of disease changed the attitude of the 
medical profession about epidemics. Memetics provides rational 
explanations for a lot of seemingly irrational human behavior. 
 
   A meme survives in the world because people pass it on to other 
people, either vertically to the next generation, or horizontally to our 
fellows.  This process is analogous to the way willow genes cause willow 
trees to spread them, or perhaps closer to the way cold viruses make us 
sneeze and spread them. 
 
   Collections of organisms make up ecosystems.  Human culture is a vast 
collection of memes, a memetic ecosystem.  The diagram below is in terms 
of increasing complexity. 
 
                      Memes  (groups form culture, stabilized by meta-memes)
                  Organisms (groups form ecosystems)
               Cells
            DNA (informational though embedded in material)
-------------------------------------
        molecules                  material
     atoms
 sub atomic
 
   Once the informational boundary is crossed, biological models of 
replication and survival become applicable.  Most of the memes that make 
up human culture are of the shoemaking kind.  A rationale for the spread 
and persistence of these ideas/skills seems obvious:  they aid the 
survival of people who in turn teach the same ideas and skills to the 
next generation. 
 
   But a good fraction of the memes that make up human culture fall into 
the categories of political, philosophical, or religious.  A rationale 
for the spread and persistence for these memes is a much deeper problem. 
The spread of some memes of these classes at the expense of others is of 
intense concern to many readers of Reason.  If we are to be effective at 
judging ideas and promoting the spread of ones we think are more 
rational, it would be useful to understand how memes come about, how they 
use people to spread, and why the self-interest of the people who spread 
a meme and the meme's "interest" are not always the same. 
 
   Study of these concepts may provide insight into why some ideas are 
more attractive than others and into what "rational" and "objective" 
mean.  Much of the recent progress in understanding evolution came from a 
viewpoint shift: biologists started looking at the world from the 
viewpoint of genes. Because genes influence their own survival (via 
causal loops) the ones we observe seem as if they were "striving" to be 
represented by more copies in the next generation.  Memes too seem to 
"strive."  Of course, this is metaphor, since neither genes nor memes are 
conscious.  In the process of making more copies of themselves in human 
minds memes sometimes work at cross purposes with human genes.  At least 
three different and conflicting viewpoints for determining "rational" and 
"objective" exist: from the viewpoint of the genes a person carries, from 
the viewpoint of the memes they carry (or are infected with) and from 
their conscious mind, shaped by both genes and memes. 
 
     Memes and humans have co-evolved.  Pre-human minds were, like 
current human minds, the substrate for memes.  Pre-human minds were the 
memetic equivalent of the "primal soup" in which genetic life started.  
Replicating information patterns such as the ones which built mental 
structures for chipping rock or (much later) controlling fire improved 
the survival of certain human genes. These genes in turn built bodies and 
minds able to learn and pass on the memes. 
 
    The result was a double positive feedback cycle where memes for 
survival- enhancing behavior and genes for mental hardware able to learn 
and pass along memes were both favored.  The combination is so successful 
that human beings and their complex cultures inhabit the largest 
ecological range on the planet (at least for animals of our size). 
 
   Any ecological success becomes a fertile ground for parasites.  The 
environment of the cell nucleus with its raw materials and enzyme systems 
for replicating DNA/RNA is hijacked by viruses.  Likewise, the 
human/memetic system is beset by biological and memetic parasites.  
Successful parasites (that is the ones which don't kill off their host) 
evolve into mutualistic symbionts. The host also evolves to be resistant 
to parasites. I think both genetic and memetic responses to parasitic 
memes can be recognized. 
 
   Parasitic memes have been strongly selected to fit the strange quirks 
that developed in human mental systems as they evolved. For example, the 
ability to plan into the future confers a strong survival advantage, 
especially since the introduction of farming. But being able to think 
about the future (and past) generates troubling problems when this 
ability is applied to questions such as where-was-I-before-birth or 
where-will-I-go-after-death.  The attractiveness of religious belief 
systems largely stems from providing "plausible" answers to questions 
that would not be asked except for the hyperdevelopment of this mental 
skill. 
 
   To illustrate the lifelike quality of memes, here is my story about 
how a meme was introduced to a sub-culture, how it thrived, evolved, and 
finally became extinct. 
 
   When I went to college in 1960, the University of Arizona registration 
material included a punch card for religion.  I figured (correctly) that 
they would sort this card out and send it to the 'church of your choice' 
so the churches could send around press gangs on Sunday morning.  At the 
time, I was drifting away from the church in which I had been raised.  
(My intellectual and social development had simply become incompatible 
with churches of any kind.)  I wasn't expecting this question, hadn't 
given any thought to what I would put down, and was in a hurry to get 
through the lines of registration checkers. I remembered an old SF story 
that hinged on a mystery word, Myob, later explained as an acronym for 
Mind Your Own Business.  Why not?  I put down MYOB in the religion space, 
and got away with it when they asked me what it meant. 
 
   By the next semester I had thought up a better answer.  The high 
school crowd I ran around with had used runes to write silly messages on 
the blackboards, and we actually knew quite a bit about old religions.  
So I put down Druid, and got away with it.  In fact, the harried 
registration checkers who asked what was a Druid didn't let me get more 
than a sentence or two into my prerecorded rap about how the Druids had 
been around a lot longer than the upstart Christians. 
 
   It was far too good a prank to keep to myself.  Several of my old high 
school buddies were also at the U of A and imitated my "Druid 
registration behavior." After a few semesters, there were hundreds of 
people doing it, and in several mutated forms.  Of course, there had to 
be "Reformed Druids," and that opened a niche for "Orthodox Druids."  
There were "Southern Druids." There were the "Primitive Druids" at one 
point, and several variations on "Church of the nth Druid."  One of the 
best was the "Zen Druids."  They worshiped trees that may, or may not, 
have been there.  Winner for the best take-off was the "Latter Day 
Druids." 
 
   For modeling, this "replicating information pattern, manifesting as 
behavior of students claiming to be members of a defunct religion" could 
be considered as a fad, a group of fads, or (from the point of view of 
annoyed school administrators) a '60s MOVEMENT.  My spies in the 
University administration reported that it peaked in the late '60s with 
about 20 percent of the student body claiming (almost all tongue in 
cheek) to be some sort of Druids.  This memetic infection was faithfully 
passed down from year to year infecting the incoming students, many of 
whom thumbed their noses in this small way at the administration for the 
rest of their college years.  At one point there were three or four rival 
Druid Student Centers, and the Bandersnatch, an off-campus humor 
newspaper, was published by the Druid Free Press. 
 
   University administrators created vast amounts of unnecessary 
paperwork for the students every semester.  There was one card that took 
at least half an hour to fill out.  They wanted your life history in six 
point spaces to "create accurate publicity about you."  I very much doubt 
that one in a thousand of those were ever used.  While wasting student 
time was irrelevant to administrators, it was not to the students, and it 
was easy to get annoyed.  In a rough biological analogy, this created a 
niche for a meme inducing behavior that got back in a small, safe way at 
the administrators. 
 
   Once introduced, the "Druid" meme was subject to a large number of 
small variations, mutations if you will, but was still recognizable. My 
introduction of this idea was not particularly original, but most "new" 
memes are just old ones with the serial numbers filed off and a new coat 
of paint. 
 
   In a very lifelike way, the Druid meme in this subculture grew 
exponentially over several "cycles" exactly the way an epidemic does.  
When the susceptible population was mostly infected it became very much 
like an endemic disease, with only the newcomers catching it.  It may 
have jumped to other schools through transfer students, but I have no 
direct knowledge. 
 
   Did U of A Druids turn into a persistent fad, like illiterate 
graffiti?  Sorry to say, but no.  In the early seventies some smart 
people in the university administration removed this question from 
registration for four years and interrupted the chain of infection. 
 
   I would have considered my Druid example as entirely harmless, but in 
the mid '70s I met someone in the same city who had made a serious 
commitment to the old religions.  I doubt that the memetic infection I 
introduced had much to do with the resurgence of pagan religions in the 
US, and little if anything to do with activity in England, but it 
certainly gave me pause to find someone about to move to a remote place 
in Iceland where he thought the old religions were still being practiced. 
"Replicating ideas" are always changing in the minds of those they 
infect, and they can mutate (sometimes a lot) with every new person they 
infect.  It is hard to predict exactly what behavior a particular meme 
will be inducing next week, because you never know how the meme may 
interact with other memes, or mutate. 
 
   My next example of a meme at work was clearly harmful, in fact lethal. 
 
   Remember Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple incident?  Jones started out 
in his youth infected with a fairly standard version of fundamentalist 
Christianity. Later this belief was replaced with--or mutated into--as 
strange a mix of socialism, Maoist communism, and personal lunacy as you 
are likely to find. Jones first promoted his new beliefs from within the 
organized outer shell of his previous one.  He moved those he had 
infected from Indianapolis to Oakland, and than to an isolated patch of 
jungle.  Jones and his group kept cycling ideas between the leader and 
his followers.  There was little correction from re- ality, and, like a 
wild rumor, the memes got weirder at every cycle. Eventually, these 
beliefs (more accurately the mental structures built or programmed by 
these memes within the minds of Jones and his followers) reached the 
point where they had so much influence over them that their personal 
survival became an insignificant influence. 
 
    The mass suicide was an unusual (and thus newsworthy) episode.  But 
history records a number of similar incidents, with similar memetic 
origins.  The Children's Crusades of the Middle Ages and the mass 
starvation in the 1850's of the Xhoas in South Africa are typical 
examples.  Mass suicide episodes do not seem rational from either a 
memetic or genetic viewpoint. But they make sense as a consequence of 
human susceptibility to beliefs that happen to have fatal outcomes. They 
are close analogs of diseases that overkill their victims--like Dutch elm 
disease. 
 
   Consider the "Killing Fields" of Kampuchea.  The people who killed 
close to a third of the population of Kampuchea do not seem to have 
profited from their efforts much more than Jones. In the memetic view of 
history, ideas of influence are seen as more important than the 
particular people who hold them.  Some memes (for example Nazism) are 
observed to thrive during periods of economic chaos just as diseases 
flourish in an undernourished population.  Thus it is not much of a 
surprise that Nazi-related beliefs emerged in the Western farm states 
during the recent hard times. 
 
   Beside being utilitarian and dangerous, memes can be fun.  Fads, such 
as hula hoops or pet rocks can be considered as the behavioral outcome of 
memes. Memetics links the pet rocks fad, the Nazis, drug "epidemics," and 
the problems in Belfast, Beirut, Iran, and Central America.  *ALL* result 
from replicating information patterns which lie behind the whole range of 
social movements.  This is not to downgrade the effects of population 
pressure, ecological limits, or the marketplace.  But while these provide 
substrate and predisposition, the specific form of social response which 
emerges in a crisis depends on memes, either already present or imported, 
and how well they replicate in the pre-existing memetic ecosystem. 
 
    Why do these "replicating information patterns" jump from mind to 
mind, sometimes setting off massive, and occasionally dangerous, social 
movements? Memes that are good at inducing those they infect to spread 
them, and ones that are easy to catch, simply become more common.  Since 
this is circular reasoning, I need to restate the question.  What, in the 
evolutionary prehistory of our race, has predisposed us to be a substrate 
to memes that can harm us? 
 
   The ability to learn from each other is strongly rooted in our 
evolutionary past.  Mammals are generally good at this, primates depend 
on it, and we are the absolute masters of passing information from person 
to person and generation to generation. In fact, the amount of data 
passed on through human culture is much, much greater than the vast 
amount of information we pass on through our genes. We are obligatory 
"informavores," and simply could not live in most of the world without 
vast amounts of information on how to survive there.  I am not talking 
just about the need to read The Wall Street Journal if you are in the 
financial business, but the need for a little child to learn (without 
using trial and error!) that cars make streets dangerous places. 
 
    Though the evolutionary origins of our susceptibility to memes is 
fairly obvious, it is instructive to examine the actual mechanisms of the 
mind that are engaged when we are infected with a meme. 
 
    Recent research in neurology and artificial intelligence has produced 
a remarkable model of the mind.   Minds are beginning to be viewed as 
vast parallel collections of simpler elements, called "agents" or 
modules.* 
 
    Memes are information patterns which, like a recipe, guide the 
construction of some agents, or groups of agents.  A "walking under 
ladders leads to bad luck" meme has successfully infected someone when it 
has built agents that modify a person's behavior when walking near 
ladders. 
 
   Some mental agents are "wired in".  The most obvious ones pull our 
hands back from hot things. Others are not so obvious, but one which has 
considerable study is often called "the inference engine."  Split brain 
research has established it to be physically located in the left brain of 
most people, close to or overlapping the speech area.  This module seems 
to be the source of inferences that organize the world into a consistent 
whole.  The same hardware seems to judge externally presented memes for 
plausibility.  This piece of mental hardware is, at the same time, the 
wellspring of advances, and the source of vast error. ----- *The new 
models even offer an explanation for that difficult problem, the origin 
of consciousness.  Each agent is too simple to be conscious, but 
consciousness incidentally emerges as a property of the interconnections 
of these agents.  In Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky uses the analogy that 
consciousness emerges from non-conscious elements just as the property of 
confinement emerges from six properly arranged boards, none of which (by 
itself) has any property of confinement.  (And you thought Ids and Egos 
were complicated.) 
 
    Being able to infer, that is to find new relations in the way the 
world is organized, and being able to learn inferences from others must 
rank among our most useful abilities. Unfortunately, outputs of this 
piece of mental hardware are all too often of National Enquirer quality.  
Unless reined in by hard-to-learn mental skills, this part of our minds 
can lead us into disaster. Experiments detailing the kinds of serious 
errors this mental module makes can be found in Human Inference by 
Nesbitt and Ross and in The Social Brain by Michael Gazzaniga. 
 
   (Sidebar)  *****************************************
 
Gazzaniga demonstrated the activity of the inference engine module with 
some very clever experiments on split brain patients.  By the module 
failing, we can clearly see how it is doing the best it can with 
insufficient data. 
 
    What Gazzaniga did is to present each side of the brain with a simple 
conceptual problem.  The left side saw a picture of a claw, and the right 
side saw a picture of a snow scene.  A variety of cards was place in 
front of the patient who was asked to pick the card which went with what 
he saw.  The correct answer for the left hemisphere was a picture of a 
chicken.  For the right half-brain it was a show shovel. 
 
    "After the two pictures are flashed to each half-brain, the subjects 
    are required to point to the answers.  A typical response is that of 
    P.S., who pointed to the chicken with his right hand and the shovel 
    with the left. After his response I asked him 'Paul, why did you do 
    that?'  Paul looked up and without a moment's hesitation said from 
    his left hemisphere, 'Oh, that's easy.  The chicken claw goes with 
    the chicken and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.' 
 
    "Here was the left half-brain having to explain why the left hand was 
    pointing to a shovel when the only picture it saw was a claw.  The 
    left brain is not privy to what the right brain saw because of the 
    brain's disconnection.  Yet the patents's own body was doing 
    something. Why was it doing that?  Why was the left hand pointing to 
    the shovel?  The left-brain's cognitive system needed a theory and 
    instantly supplied one that made sense given the information it had 
    on this particular task . . . ." 
 
   The inference engine was a milestone in our evolution.  It works far 
more often than it fails.  But as you can see from the example, the 
inference engines will wring blood from a stone; you can count on its 
finding causal relations whether they exist or not.  Worse yet, the 
inference engine probably can't detect when it doesn't have enough data.  
Even if it could, it has no way to tell that to the verbal (conscious) 
self. 
 
(end sidebar) *********************************************
 
    There are both genetic and memetic controls on the dangerous beliefs 
that arise in this module, though they don't always work.  I can't point 
to genes for skepticism but (provided it did not interfere too much with 
necessary learning) this characteristic would be of considerable survival 
advantage. Being entirely uncritical of the memes you are exposed to can 
be a fatal trait, or it can result in reduced (or no) fertility. The 
classic example of a genetically fatal belief is the Shaker religion,  
but intense involvement with a wide variety of memes (or derived social 
movements) statistically results in fewer children. Unlike the Shakers 
(who practiced total abstinence), the Rajneesh cult in Oregon practiced a 
sexual free-for-all. However, they discouraged births--and children--to 
the extreme of sterilizing the barely pubescent children of their 
members. From the meme's viewpoint, the more effort its host puts into 
promoting the meme (living example, proselytizing, etc.) the better.  
From the host gene's viewpoint, memes that reduce fertility are a 
disaster. 
 
   Many memes take the shortcut and spread from person to person.  Others 
spread in concert with the host genes, promoting fertility.  Several 
religious memes fall into this category: Hutterite beliefs spread 
exclusively with the genes of the believers.  Mormon memes take both 
routes--both are long term success stories.  (Though ecological limits or 
social upheavals will eventually stop exponential growth in these cases.) 
 
   There are other defenses against the uncritical acceptance of 
potentially dangerous memes.  Most common is the trait of rejecting all 
newfangled ideas, where "newfangled" is usually defined as any to which 
one has not been exposed before puberty. Societies have similar defenses 
against new ideas.  There are also powerful meta-memes, that is, memes 
used to judge other memes.  Of these, the scientific method is perhaps 
the most effective.  Logic is another system by which memes can be 
tested, at least for consistency. 
 
   In historical times a meta-meme of tolerance (especially religious 
tolerance) has emerged in western culture.  This is a remarkable event, 
since memes inducing tolerance to other memes would be expected to lose 
in the competition for mind space to memes which induce intolerance to 
other beliefs.  Within small, isolated social groups, this is still the 
case. 
 
    But in larger cultural ecosystems, when traders come with obnoxious 
ideas and customs, but desirable goods, at least limited tolerance is a 
requirement if any trading is to be done. There were many other factors 
in the development of modern western tolerance such as the Renaissance 
and the indecisive religious wars that swept back and forth across 
Europe.  Still, the advantage of trading goods may have been the primary 
force at work in the memetic ecosystem which caused many belief systems 
to adopt a tolerant-toward-other-beliefs component. Cooperative behavior 
is known to spontaneously emerge from groups (even groups at war) when 
certain conditions are present. Free trade may be similarly linked to the 
emergence of the meta-meme of tolerance, and in turn to the 
respectability of free thought.  Testing these speculations would require 
rating the trade/tolerance of many groups and seeing if there is (or was) 
correlation. 
 
   With respect to the USSR, trade and tolerance are both at a low level. 
Historically trade was a much smaller part of the economy during the time 
the rest of Europe was undergoing the Renaissance.   The recent attempts 
to introduce tolerance to other modes of economic systems in the USSR 
have more than a superficial similarity to the Catholic church finally 
deciding to live with the Protestants.  A modern-day Renaissance in the 
USSR may be based on the free exchange of information through computers 
and free(r) trade. 
 
    China presents a classic case of innovative memes spreading from the 
ports. Until England intervened and opened a weak China the rulers tried 
to quarantine dangerous foreigners and their infectious ideas near the 
ports.  To this day the most productive parts of China are where 
capitalist/free market memes spread from the seaports.  It may be that 
homogeneous, closed groups without the influence of outsiders reinforce 
their belief systems into the ground, burning heretics and stagnating 
economically, until they are forced to open their ports. 

    A full analysis may eventually determine that tolerance, innovation, 
combating cultural and economic stagnation are *all* dependent on free 
trade. 
 
    Memes and trade are coupled the other way as well.  The feedback loop 
for many memes is closed through goods made for the marketplace.  Better 
ideas for how to make shoes, or computers, or (you name it) spread best 
when they are tested in the marketplace.  Closing the ports (currently a 
popular idea in Silicon Valley) to either ideas or goods is a memetic 
disaster. Bad products and bad ideas are weeded by market place 
competition. 
 
    Study of ecosystems usually leads to a great deal of appreciation of 
the complexity that has been worked into them through evolution.  Our 
actively evolving memetic ecosystem (culture) has been shaped over many 
centuries by the rise and fall of the replicating information patterns 
which have come down to us.  These memes that make up our culture are 
essentially living entities.  They struggle against each other for space 
in minds and lives, they are continually evolving.  New memes arise in 
human mental modules, old memes mutate, and many become confined to 
books.  The ferment is most noticeable on the edge of new scientific 
knowledge, pop culture, and the ever shifting of ascendant political 
ideas.  Western culture is as complicated as a rain forest, and deserves 
no less respect, admiration, understanding, and care. 
 
    The vast majority of the memes we pass from person to person or 
generation to generation are either helpful or at least harmless.  It is 
hard to see that these elements of our culture have a separate identity 
from us.  But a few of these replicating information patterns are clearly 
dangerous. By being obviously harmful, they are easy to see as a separate 
class of evolving, parasitic, lifelike forms.  A very dangerous group 
leads to behavior such as the People's Temple suicides, or similar cases 
that dot our history.  The most dangerous class leads to vast killings 
like that of the Nazis in WW II, the Communists in post-revolutionary 
Russia, and the Kampuchea self-genocide. 
 
   The development of memetics provides improved mental tools (models) 
for thinking about the influences, be they benign, silly, or fatal, that 
replicating information patterns have on all of us.  Here is a source of 
danger if memetics comes of age and only a few learn to create meme sets 
of great influence. Here too is liberation for those who can recognize 
and analyze the memes to which they are exposed.  If "the meme about 
memes" infects enough people, rational social movements might become more 
common.

 ----- 
 
The author gratefully acknowledges ideas and editorial assistance from 
Arel Lucas. 
Newsgroups: alt.cyberspace