Memetics publications on the web

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 of International Studies Quarterly
• Beer, Francis A. "Memetic Meanings" JOM:EMIT (1999): a commentary on Rose's "Controversies in Meme Theory"
• * 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.memetics 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. & Sandberg, 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 installed in the first place. Then once it is in place, memes inside the complex are mutually supportive, can go on being added to almost infinitely, and the whole complex is resistant to evidence that it is false."
• Blackmore, Susan "Imitation and the definition of a meme" JOM:EMIT (1998): "When we are clear about the nature of imitation, it is obvious what does and does not count as a meme."
• Blackmore, Susan "Meme, Myself, I" New Scientist (1999): Gives an overview of Blackmore's The Meme Machine.
• Blackmore, Susan "The Forget-Meme-Not Theory" Times Higher Education Supplement (1999)
• Blackmore, Susan "The Power of Memes" Scientific American (2000): "Behaviors and ideas copied from person to person by imitation - memes - may have forced human genes to make us what we are today."
• Blackmore, Susan "Evolution and Memes: The human brain as a selective imitation device" Cybernetics and Systems (2001)
• Blissett, Luther "On the Misdefinition of Memetics: A letter to the Journal of Memetics discussion list" Disumbrationist League Bulletin (1998): "What Lynch sees as 'artifacts' that lie outside of the main interest of the discipline, I see as the only data points we have within the discipline."
• Bloom, Howard "History of the Global Brain" Telepolis (1997): Several articles on how the memetic environment operates as a whole.
• Bollen, Johan "Adaptive Hypertext Networks That Learn the Common Semantics of Their Users" (199?): "We... demonstrate that hypertext networks can be equipped with locally operating algorithms that can make networks self-organise their structure and content."
• Bollen, Johan: see also Marsden, Paul
• Bouissac, P. "The Construction of Ignorance and the Evolution of Knowledge": "The way, in which theories come and go, prosper and disappear, indicates that, although they are generally considered to be produced by human brains, they are endowed with a relative degree of autonomy with respect to the populations of organisms among which they spread with various degrees of success."
• Bouissac, P. "Memes Matter" Semiotic Review of Books (1994): A "speculative exploration of the memes-as-parasites hypothesis"
• Bouissac, P. "Why Do Memes Die?": "It can be hypothesized that there are at least four causes which can bring about the demise of a meme."
• Boyd, Gary "The Human Agency of Meme Machines" JOM:EMIT (2001): A review of Blackmore's The Meme Machine
• Boyd, Robert: see Henrich, Joe
• Brin, David "The New Meme" Kaleidospace (1993): Centuries of meme wars featuring feudalism, machismo, paranoia, "The East," and calm.
• Brodie, Richard "Crisis of the Mind" (1996): The introduction to Virus of the Mind.
• Brown, Andrew "The Meme Hunter" Salon (1997): A discussion of Blackmore's research into memetics.
• Burroughs, William S. "Feedback From Watergate to the Garden of Eden": "I advance the theory that virus is a very small unit of word and image."

C

• Calvin, William H. "The Six Essentials? Minimal Requirements for the Darwinian Bootstrapping of Quality" JOM:EMIT (1997): "[A] full-fledged Darwinian process needs six essential ingredients to keep going, to recursively bootstrap quality from rude beginnings."
• Campbell, Donald: see Heylighen, Francis
• Castelfranchi, Cristiano "Towards a Cognitive Memetics: Socio-Cognitive Mechanisms for Memes Selection and Spreading" JOM:EMIT (2001): "To understand cultural evolution it is necessary to identify the cognitive principles of the success or selection of memes within minds. Memetics can only be cognitive, otherwise it is contradictory and non explanatory."
• Chattoe, Edmund "Just How (Un)realistic are Evolutionary Algorithms as Representations of Social Processes?" JASSS (1998): "[A]ttempts to illustrate the importance of a coherent behavioural interpretation in applying evolutionary algorithms... to the modelling of social processes."
• Chattoe, Edmund "Virtual Urban Legends: Investigating the Ecology of the World Wide Web" IRISS Conference (1998)
• Clemens, Samuel "What Is Man?": "Personally you did not create even the smallest microscopic fragment of the materials out of which your opinion is made; and personally you cannot claim even the slender merit of putting the borrowed materials together. That was done automatically - by your mental machinery, in strict accordance with the law of that machinery's construction. And you not only did not make that machinery yourself, but you have not even any command over it."
• Clewley, Robert "Emergence without magic: the role of memetics in multi-scale models of evolution and behavior" (1998): "It is suggested that memetics should be unified with less abstract theories of culture and individual psychology, under a methodologically reductionist view of science. A possible approach to this is outlined."
• Clewley, Robert "Reinterpreting Memetics in a Multi-Level View of Evolution and Behaviour" (1998): "[C]urrent forms of memetic theory may appear to unify the language of social interactions, but often oversimplify the ontology and dynamics of real cultural processes."
• Cloak, F.T. "Elementary Self-Replicating Instructions and Their Works" 9th Ann. Cong. of Anthro. & Ethno. Sci. (1973): "A reconstruction of Darwinism... brings genetic and cultural evolution into a common conceptual framework, including a common system of notation..."
• Cook, Steve "Inf(l)ections": Writing as Virus, Hypertext as Meme.
• Cooren, François: see Giroux, Hélène
• Cowley, Geoffrey "Viruses of the Mind: How Odd Ideas Survive" Newsweek (1997): A review of memetics in the wake of the Heaven's Gate suicides.
• Cox, Paul "Memes and Schemes": Chapter 2 of a work in progress about 'schemes' - collections of memes that form paradigms or outlooks.
• Cristianini, N. "Evolution and Learning: An Epistemological Perspective" (1995): "Starting from the observation that the structure itself of an organism embodies knowledge about the environment which it is adapted to, it is possible to regard evolution as a learning process."
• Cullen, Ben "Parasite Ecology and the Evolution of Religion" The Evolution of Complexity (1995): "Most of the world's established religions are transmitted vertically, from parents to children, and are therefore expected to be benign towards their hosts."
• * Cziko, Gary "Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution" (1995): "argues for universal selection theory, the bold conjecture that all knowledge and knowledge growth are due to a process of cumulative blind variation and selection."

D

• * Darwin, Charles "On the Origin of Species" (1859): "This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest."
• * Darwin, Charles "The Descent of Man" (1871): "[M]an must be included with other organic beings in any general conclusion respecting his manner of appearance on this earth."
• * Dawkins, Richard "Memes: The New Replicators" The Selfish Gene (1976): "Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation."
• * Dawkins, Richard "Viruses of the Mind" Dennett and His Critics (1991): Argues that religion is a pathological meme, science a sensible one. "[T]he selective forces that scrutinize scientific ideas are not arbitrary and capricious. They are exacting, well-honed rules, and they do not favor pointless self-serving behavior."
• Dawkins, Richard "The Selfish Meme" Time (1999): An adaptation of his introduction to Blackmore's The Meme Machine.
• de Jong, Martin "Survival of the institutionally fittest concepts" JOM:EMIT (1999): "Certain arguments generated by political and administrative actors find their way to tangible policy actions, others do not... This article spots the issue of political decision making from an evolutionary and memetics perspective..."
• * Dennett, Daniel "Memes and the Exploitation of Imagination" J. Aesthetics and Art Criticism (1990): "[A]lmost no one writing about the evolution of ideas or cultural evolution treats the underlying Darwinian ideas with the care they deserve. I propose to remedy that."
• Dennett, Daniel "Memes: Myths, Misunderstandings and Misgivings" (1998): "[The] spectrum of possibilities, from the unwitting, unconscious hosting of culture-borne viruses (of all 'attitudes') to the foresightful design and promulgation of inventions and creations that intelligently and artfully draw upon well-understood cultural resources, must be viewable under a single, unifying perspective."
• Dennett, Daniel "The Evolution of Culture" Feed (1999): "That is the truism: cultures evolve over time... Now let's turn to the controversial question... Are there any good theories or models of cultural evolution?"
• Diller, Karl C. "The Evolution of Complexity in the Evolution of Language: grammaticalization, pidgin languages, and language acquisition" (Abstract only):
• Doran, Jim "Simulating Collective Misbelief" JASSS (1998): "Experiments are reported which have been designed to investigate the phenomenon of collective misbelief in artificial societies."
• 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 torture and 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 Selection" (1996): "This theory is inspired by Charles Darwin's idea of natural selection, because cultural elements are seen as analogous to genes, in the sense that they may be reproduced from generation to generation and they may undergo change."
• 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 "Culture, Evolution, and Computation" Proc. 2nd Online Workshop on Evolutionary Computation (1996): "Cultural evolution presents a paradox analogous to the origin of life: the origin of a potentially creative stream of thought in an infant's brain."
• 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 to explain the awakening of abstract thought in hominids.
• Gabora, Liane "The Meme Machine JASSS: A review of Blackmore's The Meme Machine
• Gabora, Liane "MemeStreams: Culture and Evolution of Our Conceptual Tapestry" (1999): (outline and sample chapter)
• Gatherer, Derek "Macromemetics: Towards a Framework for the Re-unification of Philosophy" JOM:EMIT (1997): "The principal conclusion is that wherever philosophy is concerned with informational entities, a memetical approach may be applied."
• * Gatherer, Derek "Why the 'Thought Contagion' Metaphor is Retarding the Progress of Memetics" JOM:EMIT (1998): "[T]he least philosophically problematic constitution for a science of memetics would be to... restrict the use of the term to those replicating cultural phenomena which can be directly observed or measured."
• Gatherer, Derek "The Case for Commentary" JOM:EMIT (1999): An attempt to direct the scope of commentary on "Why the 'Thought Contagion' Metaphor is Retarding the Progress of Memetics."
• Gatherer, Derek "A Plea for Methodological Darwinism" JOM:EMIT (1999): a commentary on Rose's "Controversies in Meme Theory"
• Gatherer, Derek "Reply to the commentaries on my paper: Why the 'Thought Contagion' Metaphor is Retarding the Progress of Memetics" JOM:EMIT (1999)
• Gatherer, Derek "Modelling the effects of memetic taboos on genetic homosexuality" JOM:EMIT (2001): "Simple computer simulations of the interaction of genetic factors and memetic taboos in human homosexuality, are presented."
• Giroux, Hélène, Taylor, James R. & Cooren, François"Memes and the persistence of organizational structures" Symposium on Memetics: EMIT (1998): Uses the analogy of the cell and its genetic material to describe the organization and its parts.
• Godin, Seth "Unleashing the Ideavirus" (2000): A book about viral marketing - available on-line, free of charge
• Goodhall, Steven: see Reynolds, Robert G.
• Gottsch, John D. "Mutation, Selection, And Vertical Transmission Of Theistic Memes in Religious Canons" JOM:EMIT (2001): "A study of ancient and modern Near Eastern religious canons reveals the mutation, selection, and vertical transmission of fitness-enhancing textual units, defined as theistic memes."
• Grant, Glenn "Memes: Introduction" Principia Cybernetica (1990): "[A]n idea can parasitically infect your mind and alter your behavior... Any idea which does this is called a 'meme.'"
• * Grant, Glenn "Memetic Lexicon" Principia Cybernetica (1990): A glossary of terms and categories used in memetics.
• Greiner, Christine "Memes and the creation of new patterns of movement in dance" Principia Cybernetica (1998): "...presenting a practical example: the evolution of butoh dance in the West."
• Grønnevik, H.: see Bjarneskans, H.
• Gross, Dave "Epigenetic Solutions to the Adoption Problem in Evolutionary Psychology (or, the Adoption Meme)" (1993): "I believe that meme theory can take the pathology out of adoption and eliminate [that] awkward theory for one which uses more straightforward natural selection thinking."
• Gross, Dave "The Blue Star Meme: Applying Natural Selection Thinking to Urban Legends" (1996): "How does an urban legend like the 'Blue Star' LSD Tattoo legend spread... and what does this say about the rest of the information we encounter... Darwin's principle of natural selection may help us find the answers to these questions."
• Gross, Dave "Some Reflections on Creation Versus Evolution of Memes" (1997): "My theory is that in the course of... inner dialogs, the same sort of mutations and recombinations take place as do in multi-person conversation. Each person becomes a unique evolutionary arena for memes..."

H

• Hale-Evans, Ron "Memetics: A Systems Metabiology" (1996): "[A]n application of general systems theory to memetics."
• Hales, David "An Open Mind is not an Empty Mind: Experiments in the Meta-Noosphere" JASSS (1998): "It is argued that artificial society experimentation offers a potentially fruitful response to the inherent problems of building new meme theory."
• Hales, David "Belief Has Utility - An Intentional Stance" JOM:EMIT (1999): A commentary on Gatherer's "Why the 'Thought Contagion' Metaphor is Retarding the Progress of Memetics."
• Hardy, Jack "Memetics" (1985): "You can accept memetics without exploring its outer limits, but not if you wish to understand the ironies of our lives."
• Henrich, Joe & Boyd, Robert "The evolution of conformist transmission and the emergence of between-group differences" Evolution and Human Behavior (1998)
• 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 history" Principia Cybernetica (1998)
• James, William "Great Men and their Environment" Atlantic (1880): "A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zoölogical evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other."
• Jan, Steven "Replicating Sonorities: Towards a Memetics of Music" JOM:EMIT (2000): "[T]his paper represents an attempt to integrate the central concerns of analytical musicology with a neo-Darwinian meme-selectionist perspective."

K

• NEW Kelleher, Ben: see Vos, Ed
• Kendal, Jeremy R. & Laland, Kevin N. "Mathematical Models for Memetics" JOM:EMIT (2000): "The goal of this article is to point out the similarities between memetics and cultural evolution and gene-culture co-evolutionary theory, and to illustrate the potential utility of the models to memetics."
• Kennie, Tom: see Price, If
• Kher, Unmesh "Is the Mind Just a Vehicle for Virulent Notions?" Time (1999): A review of Blackmore's The Meme Machine.

L

• Laland, Kevin N.: see Reader, Simon M. and Kendal, Jeremy R.
• Langrish, John Z. "Different Types of Memes: Recipemes, Selectemes and Explanemes JOM:EMIT (1999): "A biological perspective allows for different types of memes with different transmission mechanisms."
• Lanier, Jaron: see Godwin, Mike
• Lateiner, Joshua S. "Of Man, Mind and Machine: Meme-Based Models of Mind and the Possibility for Consciousness in Alternate Media" (1992)
• Laurent, John "A Note on the Origin of 'Memes'/'Mnemes'" JOM:EMIT (1999): Speculates that the term "meme" may have an origin in Maurice Maeterlinck's term "mneme" which he used as early as 1927 to describe memories held by social insects.
• Lynch, Aaron "Units and Events of Replication" J. Ideas (1991): Attempts to "recast the core concepts of Thought Contagion theory in language that does not depend on analogies to the biological or computer sciences."
• * Lynch, Aaron "Units, Events, and Dynamics in Memetic Evolution" JOM:EMIT (1997): "An evolutionary recursive replicator theory of mental/brain information is presented."
• Lynch, Aaron "Self-Sent Messages and Mass Belief" (1996): Chapter One of Thought Contagion: "Like a software virus in a computer network or a physical virus in a city, thought contagions proliferate by effectively 'programming' for their own retransmission."
• Lynch, Aaron "Thought Contagion Theory and the Heaven's Gate Tragedy" (1997)
• Lynch, Aaron "Thought Contagion and Mass Belief" gdi-impuls (1997): Discusses how memes spread.
• Lynch, Aaron "Units, Events and Dynamics in Memetic Evolution" JOM:EMIT (1998): "An evolutionary recursive replicator theory of mental/brain information is presented... [E]quations 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."
• Lynch, Aaron "Rationales for Mathematical Modeling, and Points of Terminology" JOM:EMIT (1998): A response to Best's critique of 'Units, Events and Dynamics.'
• Lynch, Aaron "The 1998 Internet Stocks Phenomenon (1998): "To fully understand the recent price surge [in internet stocks] we need to use thought contagion theory."
• Lynch, Aaron "The Millennium Contagion (1998): Millennial hysteria as a mental Y2K bug.
• Lynch, Aaron "Email Thought Contagions (1998): Fighting fire with fire.
• Lynch, Aaron "Misleading Mix of Religion and Science" JOM:EMIT (1999): A commentary on Gatherer's "Why the 'Thought Contagion' Metaphor is Retarding the Progress of Memetics."
• Lynch, Aaron "Thought Contagion JASSS (1999): A response to Paul Marsden's review of Lynch's book (see Marsden: "Castles in the Sky")
• Lynch, Aaron Excerpts from "The Memetic Mind" The Evolution of Intelligence (1999): Examples of thought contagion
• Lynch, Aaron "Memes and Mass Delusion" (1999): A lecture presented to the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking
• Lynch, Aaron: see also Barbrook, Richard

M

• Marr, A.J. "Dawkin's Bad Idea: Memes, Genes and the Metaphors of Psychology" (2000): Contrasts biobehavioral models for information processing with meme theory.
• Marsden, Paul "Crash Contagion and the Death of Diana: Towards a Memetic Paradigm for Understanding Mass Behavior" (1997): "[M]emetics may come to provide researchers with a viable non-Cartesian conceptualization of the human individual and behaviour."
• Marsden, Paul "Operationalising Memetics - Suicide, the Werther Effect, and the work of David P. Phillips" (1998)
• Marsden, Paul "A review of [Price's & Shaw's] 'Shifting the Patterns'" JOM:EMIT (1998): "[T]he focus of this review will restrict itself to an assessment to the authors particular application of meme theory."
• 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."
• NEW 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 finally some 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."
• 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 on afflicted individuals."
• 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 meme theory.
• Runciman, W. "Socialising Darwin" Prospect (1998): "[T]he value of Darwin's insight... extends beyond his original concern with the origin of species. It extends... forward into the process of the evolution of consciousness from which art, literature and science have emerged."
• 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

• 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. "A Mind Virus Writes to Richard Dawkins" Freethinker (1997): "We, DNA and mind viruses do not just copy ourselves, our survival depends upon undermining determined defenses."
• Skoyles, John R.: see also Vaneechoutte, Mario
• Speel, 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 conceptual phenotype, 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."
• Vandekerckhove, P.: see Bruynseels, K.
• Vaneechoutte, Mario "The Memetic Basis of Religion" Nature (1993): "Memes then are those thought constructions which can supply an individual with certainty about its own fate."
• Vaneechoutte, Mario "Bird Song as a Possible Cultural Mechanism for Speciation" JOM:EMIT (1997): "[I]t can be hypothesized that nongenetically encoded phenotypic behavior may cause actual isolation of subpopulations, leading... to speciation in some taxa..."
• Vaneechoutte, Mario & Skoyles, John R. "The memetic origin of language: modern humans as musical primates" JOM:EMIT (1998): "Language... owes its existence not to innate language learning competencies, but to innate music-associated ones, which... can be straightforwardly explained to have evolved by natural selection."
• Vaneechoutte, Mario "The replicator: a misnomer. Conceptual implications for genetics and memetics" Principia Cybernetica (1998)
• NEW Vos, Ed & Kelleher, Ben "Mergers and Takeovers: A Memetic Approach" JOM:EMIT (2001): "[F]inance based motivational studies on M&A activities have not established that this activity `adds value' to the acquiring firm... managers (the meme holders) use mergers and acquisitions to enhance their power, and in gaining this power managers unconsciously provide an improved medium through which their memetic `stories' may be replicated."
• Vos, J.: see Bruynseels, K.
• NEW Vromen, Jack J. "A Review of: Jason Potts (2000) The New Evolutionary Microeconomics: Complexity, Competence and Adaptive Behaviour" JOM:EMIT (2001)

W/X/Y/Z

• Wark, McKenzie "Is 'meme' a bad meme?" Netletter (1996): "Dawkins' theory of the meme is far too simplistic to tell us much. What is a unit of meme? How is it transmitted? How is it decoded? But one quickly discovers better theories that do the same job in more detail. Starting, as I mentioned, with Foucault's theory of the statement, or Lyotard's theory of the phase."
• Westoby, Adam "The Ecology of Intentions: How to make Memes and Influence People: Culturology" (1994): "[T]he principles of cultural selection, as encapsulated in the notion of 'memes' and their evolutionary interplay, may have much to offer the human sciences - a little as the principles of natural selection have increased the understanding of biologists."
• Whallon, Robert: see Reynolds, Robert G.
• * Wilkins, John S. "What's in a Meme? Reflections from the perspective of the history and philosophy of evolutionary biology" JOM:EMIT (1998): "[C]onceptualizing memes as disease pathogens is not an alternative to evolutionary models of memetic development. I argue for a close and strict analogy between biology and memetics."
• Wilkins, John S. "Memes Ain't (Just) in the Head" JOM:EMIT (1999): A commentary on Gatherer's "Why the 'Thought Contagion' Metaphor is Retarding the Progress of Memetics."
• Wilkins, John S. "On choosing to evolve: strategies without a strategist" JOM:EMIT (1999): a commentary on Rose's "Controversies in Meme Theory"

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