



by Jack Hardy extracted from The Anomalist-11 Summer 2003 from Scribd Website The meme as a concept

Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator. He hypothesized that one could view many cultural entities as replicators, and pointed to melodies, fashions and learned skills as examples. Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behavior. Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time. Dawkins likened the process by which memes survive and change through the evolution of culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution.

Dawkins defined the meme as a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation, but later definitions would vary. The lack of a consistent, rigorous, and precise understanding of what typically makes up one unit of cultural transmission remains a problem in debates about memetics. In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. In the context of the exact sciences, memetics suffers in comparison because, unlike the idea of genes, memes do not necessarily have or need a concrete medium in order to transfer. What is a meme?



The word "meme" was first popularly used by Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene . It has come to mean a cultural accretion of knowledge, a package of several ideas that can be passed onto others. It's usually more complex than a single idea, and can represent a fashion/music/lifestyle or a belief. It is the mental equivalent of a gene whereby a package of many attributes is passed on.



The science or study of memes in action has come to be called memetics .



A meme has been regarded too narrowly I believe, and I am interested in broadening the ideas of what a meme is or can do. No matter how narrow a definition you give to a meme, sooner or later you have to consider more nebulous or abstract ideas as having acquired enough cultural accretion to have become memes. It's easy to conceive of a visual fad such as the hula-hoop as having a chartable spread through society and calling it a meme, but surely socialism, futurism or a new political idea are also memes that spread through society and are all the more interesting despite being invisible.



Memes like these, just as in any fad or fashion have a zenith before arcing into decline. There will always be a few adherents of any "ism" who may be the actual carriers of the meme, but eventually they may find themselves beached upon a shore that has no tides.



Someone new to the idea of memes might say well why don't we just call them ideas? The answer is that memes act as if they have a life of their own. Whether they do or not is not the relevant point but that they do replicate and have a dynamism that is absent from our common notion of a simple idea.



As I've thought about memes, they seem to have an arc of existence that defies simple replicative models. Indeed, I daresay that many memes lie dormant awaiting a resurgence, as might forgotten gods that can then spread like a wildfire. Let's say a meme like Nazism could be re-established and that's why volunteers are so keen to quash it.



On this model, some memes could be likened to a huge bull waiting to be let out the gate and into a china shop.



I suspect that memes act as living entities with strategies for survival and aren't therefore so simple as replicators . Maybe my definition of a meme is different to an accepted one and we will have to call my memes a jeme. As I use the word meme, I mean it to be an accretion of mental energy that acts as if it has a life of its own. This mental energy can be spread through many minds or maybe it resides someplace as yet unidentified. Whether or not this is strictly true is less important to me than the fact that this definition allows for insights and explanations previously unavailable.



Academics seem overly cautious in stepping outside of a narrow definition of what a meme is or does. I've had several discussions and some email correspondence with published authors on memes, and they mostly prefer to stay in the corral of memes they can see or point at.



I claim that so-called simple memes have embedded suppositions. Simply calling a craze or an identifiable fad a meme above other contenders is safe but useless. A linguist could explicate that any language we use to discuss something has all manner of implicit premises. The reason that we don't elaborate on them is a matter of pragmatism over philosophy. A philosopher might contend that hidden in any narrow definition are unstated assumptions that have a wider context. Anything that impinges upon our consciousness requires that only a holistic approach can be appropriate.



Simple memes may be easier to map than the nebulous meme-complexes, but as no meme has laboratory isolation, it is intellectually dishonest to suggest the purity of one over another.



Once you allow a meme to escape its unimaginative straightjacket that has kept meme theory bound for the last twenty-five years, you can accept that new explanations become possible. In human affairs, in parapsychology as well as in ordinary life, we finally have the tools to crack the nut; to explain that which was once considered unexplainable.



Memes as I use them are for the most part something that seems independent of self, and shared by several minds. However we all have a sense of self, an ego or superego that we create as we grow and could be considered our individual meme.



Rupert Sheldrake is another memetic theorist. He has postulated life forms as morphic units that create morphic fields. These fields then allow memes to operate within them.



Now my main difference with this model is that the morphogenetic hypothesis focuses too much on memory and animals somehow generating their own operational destiny. It doesn't really explain how memes can operate independently of us or how a zeitgeist (a spirit of the age) can meld human behavior to it.



I see memes as acting as if they have a life of their own. Maybe they do and maybe they aren't truly independent but they act as if they are. For Dawkins, this is why actions that seem altruistic are essentially selfish. He used memes as a way to explain how genes could perpetuate themselves by seemingly acting in ways that may appear not to maximize their survivability.



By treating memes as being akin to a genetic packet involves them having an arc of existence like a life form or morphic unit as Rupert may have it. So it is that memes can grow and die. No-one else really goes into this I think.



Another aspect of my memetic theory is that a meme innoculates itself with a little bit of its opposite. So it is that good can come out of evil and murder can erupt in paradise. This is outlined a bit more in the section on longevity.



My whole dynamic sets up notions that aren't fully explored or even considered by most would be memeticians, and this is the main difference between me and just about everyone else. Unfortunately, most academic writers on memes want to restrict the definition of them to something easily visible and are unaware of philosophical premises and assumptions that consign such simple renderings as a mask.



Sheldrake in particular is certainly on the right track and the experiments of pattern recognition after mass exposure and the illustration of pet and owner morphic resonances are classic studies.



Now there are many academics that aren't that keen on the idea of morphic fields or the idea of memes in general. It's a problem for them because they can't see it. I'd like to point out that they can't see the money in their bank accounts either, just some numbers representing it, but that is apparently not so insurmountable.



Academics aside, memes are a tool for understanding. Just like numbers, we can't point to a number or a meme, but can find the abstract has a vital form that we use to get a grip on reality.



Many thinkers have a problem with the idea of a group mind, too, which is understandable, or that memes can be anthropomorphized as having characteristics to enable their survival. Well, one approach to deflect this criticism is to say that they don't have to actually be like this, just that they behave as if they do. Same as flocking birds might not actually have a group mind but they act as if they do.



Personalizing genes and saying they adopt selfish strategies to ensure their survival is another problem area, but if they even act as a life form regardless of whether they really are, then why not treat them as such? We don't say a number is completely independent of another number but within its sphere of operation, it acts as if it is.



Now there are experiments that do seem to indicate the existence of group minds. I'll mention the 100th monkey effect in the section on devolving memes, and here just mention Restak's experiments with bees. His work can be found in Mind, number 249, and has also been featured in Howard Bloom's The Lucifer Principle (p. 140). Basically, Restak showed that bees can anticipate future sources of food despite quite complex mathematical computations. What he did was position food at increasing distances away from the first site according to a mathematical formula. As the bees all went to the area they next expected food to be at, who was doing the calculation?



For my own work on memes I take them to be a product of many thoughts, a cultural accretion of meaning. They can be a belief, a unique viewpoint. I realize this is very amorphous, but a thought may contain a meme or even a single word. They are complex and it would be foolish to try and restrict their meaning to something apparently simple. Even a word has a host of unstated premises and connotations, and words operate within a culture in an accepted way but also in a flux of meaning that can suddenly change.



It is logically impossible to fix a meaning for a meme. As long as we can agree on the basics of what memes can do and are not within broad parameters, we can enquire into them. Trying to skewer their meaning using words is only going to allow it to ever wriggle off the board. Let me give another example of a word that we can understand yet can never pin down as to exactly what it can mean in real terms. Consider the word "omnipotent." Though we can understand the general meaning, we would have logical problems in defining its actual scope. Does being omnipotent mean you could create a creature that can never be destroyed, or run a mile faster than can ever be achieved again? Whichever answer one gives is going to negate the general meaning of being omnipotent.



So basically a meme is a concept. It can be shared or held alone. These memes can have favored attachments just like molecules. Certain pairings can be more probable than others. So memes are not just an explanation for the workings of human affairs, but a way for things to find each other. With memes, man can find God, a woman can find her mate, a customs officer can find a smuggler and a hunter his prey.



Another area where memes make themselves problematic to academia is that we can use them to explain phenomena, but it is often of a kind that is non-repeatable. I think it was Arthur Koestler who postulated the existence of the library angel. What he meant was that often he was looking for some information and he'd open a book to the very page with the information he needed. Or he found a book he could use shelved wrongly, but right where he happened to look. People are known to open the Bible at a passage that seems unusually apt to their interest. I'm sure we've all had these coincidental experiences, and I doubt that we could repeat them for the sake of a scientific study, but memes can explain them.



Building memes



So how do memes work? Well, something done consciously and unconsciously builds a meme. They aren't something you can usually point at, and to devolve them (or use them) seems to work best when it happens in an unconscious way.



Let's take a meme building activity like a new fashion. Some pioneers wear it, soon the media acts as a platform for others to espouse it. Everyone quickly becomes aware of it, but not everyone is going to adopt it unless it fits in with the zeitgeist. Instead of a fashion that we can see, imagine this applying to a new philosophy or a belief. The longer this meme is built, then the more it accretes levels of meaning and spreads to include lifestyles, food, clothes and stance, all of which can indicate a particular meme. For example, consider the meme of an artist, or what it would mean to be a beatnik, hippy or a rasta. A meme that started as a fashion can soon be taken to include preferred foods or political viewpoints and philosophy. The views held by a person can now be deduced, simply by looking at the hat that they wear.



Like a plate resting upon a table, where there are only a few disparate molecules in direct contact. Or a brain where an idea can lodge in one of several areas, a meme could be said to lodge in some of many possible minds. It may change minds often and doesn't have a constant localization.



Academics seem to think that the earlier fashion meme is somehow simpler than the later accretion of several attributes. They have claimed that the simple thing that got imitated is somehow a pure meme, and the later development is a meme complex. I deny this thinking as intellectual laziness, and contend that the latter is contained wholly in the former. It's just that we haven't yet had to time to see its full fruition so are duped into assuming a seed is more complex than a flower.



Just because we can't yet chart a development, or because there is controversy here, does not mean that it isn't so. The controversy lies in the consequence being contained in the premise. There are too many vested interests that need to separate these links of x leading to y, and there is a very big blame game to play if we go down the path of accepting that some minor detail will lead to major dissonance. But this is what memes do. They start as a minor detail, say a schoolkid wearing a safety pin, and become a fully blown segment of human behavior with a generational chunk of glue sniffers. Now I use a dramatic illustration but I also feel that we can't hold back a memetic tide, nor would we endear ourselves to anyone by trying to do so. Memes are morally neutral, having both good and bad aspects that vary according to our interpretation. What can seem harmful can produce benefit and vice-versa, which is the yin and yang of them.



When I first read Dawkin's book a quarter of a century ago, I had already formed a nebulous theory of mental energy. Living in what seemed to be a vast population of like-minded people, where people all reacted the same or used the same current expressions, I envisaged a gigantic group mind. Similar to ants or bees or flocks of birds, it seemed to me that we all acted in a predictable manner that was linked to the group. I'd started to consider this a gigantic psychic generator that could surely be tapped in some way. Another thought was that there would be nodes where you could find certain phenomena like a very lucky person or someone that could do no wrong. I imagined that these nodes could be related to interference patterns and denoted either something more normal than normal, or a recipient of all this psychic flow. When I discovered the word ‘meme', I realized that this was a descriptive term that I could utilize. It took a couple of years to simmer, before I knew how to use it, and about 15 years before I suddenly realized the further implications of memetics. The mechanistic model of building and devolving memes wasn't the crux of the matter though undoubtedly this would be what people first glommed onto.



Consciousness seems to be a factor in the transmission process, though not an absolute. It's just that memes seem to operate better the less aware we are of their operation.



Unaware as well as conscious effort builds a meme so that it can be said to have a growth period, and once built, is able to be devolved, by others often unconnected to the building process. This devolvement works best by unconscious effort and is a way for knowledge to become distributed in a way once thought to be science fiction. The potential of telepathy, although fantastic, can be explained in memetic terms. Similarly, memetics does enable unconnected people to have a shared knowledge or belief system. As when scattered cultures built pyramid structures, there was a memetic diffusion of similar goals. This is exemplified by the phenomenon known as the 100th monkey effect, and to which I'll come back to shortly.



Animals can share memes. As their consciousness, is taken as being more simplistic, they are able to act alike. When flocks of birds and schools of fish turn or feed or flee all at the same time, it is difficult to explain this as a totality of separate, independent decision making. Are they all plugged into a group mind or acting in an identical way just for being biologically similar? And it's not just animals that act identically. Human children can act and react in the same way.

Are they similar for being closer to the mould?

Are they more telepathic for being more similar? This is the real advance of memetics. To ask these kind of questions that we may indeed discern answers to at some point down the road. By looking at memes as a potential indicator of both group and individual consciousness, we can unseal some of the mystery that has previously been a closed book to us.



This may initially seem overly philosophical, but memes can explain something like a soul better than the concept of souls themselves. For instance, if you take a worm and cut it into two pieces that then becomes two worms, did you also create another soul? A more prosaic explanation is that both worms would be sharing the selfsame meme as can identical twins, until their different reactions match their different experiences. Memes can seem an unnecessary concept until you start to realize that memes can explicate better than other undefined concepts that are freely used.



However interesting it can be to contrast souls as a memetic concept, for now let's just treat a meme as a package of cultural knowledge. It is an idea with an accretion of connotation aboard that can seem to act as if it has a life of its own.



Devolving memes



In the last section I suggested nodes as a place where memes could be better able to be devolved. Now this positing of nodes is really only helpful to explain why some people are vastly better able to attract phenomena than others. Like a very lucky person or vice-versa. Another illustration would be a really good artist. Many people assume that a successful artist simply has the right idea at the right time, but world-class artists seem to have more than this simple formula working for them. A good artist tells us something we recognize as a truth in an original way, and a great artist draws on something that makes their work and originality speak to other times. They draw on a muse that has many strands and are often at a loss themselves to explain how they weave it into art. They are distilling the essence of the zeitgeist. Somehow, they are devolving the spirit of the age and telling us something that we recognize as a truth. Something that we knew all along without having enunciated it. When this happens, we call it a masterpiece.



Could it be that the artist has positioned themselves on a node that devolves this creative energy? Their brains are a receiving medium for something they have unconsciously sought. It certainly seems that there have been geographical distilleries of genius like Athens or Paris in the past.



I've noticed a similar thing happen with music. I know the success of one local band can fuel the aspirations of others, but certain places whether Salzburg or Liverpool seem to throw up on occasion not just a singular bloom but a whole bouquet. Most bands, unlike artists seem to make a handful of distinctive rousing music and then atrophy. They never better their first original work, and plough the same furrow making their later compositions just variations on a theme. Yet there are rare artists that can define an era, and their work both embodies and propagates memes. Bubba Sparxx rapped, "Rhyming chose me."



As with art, science and theory leaps forward from singular people or places that seem truly inspired. Yet there are often people working on similar things but only the one that gets the credit and is remembered. If it could ever be shown that radical ideas and advances come from on high, it must be a scattergun approach where several people are simultaneously trying to establish it, and it doesn't really matter who will win the race; just that one will.



The above are speculative asides. My main thrust is that ideas, fads or philosophies can be transmitted without local contact. These are memes that can be devolved and spread within limitations or throughout all society.



Consider personal experience of how this could be. Haven't we all done something for the first time and then discovered how natural it can seem? Just like riding a bicycle, it can take a few moments and then seem like we always could do it.



Don't we all know someone that did something by chance and then it became a life's work or career?



Let's consider a body of knowledge, a recently evolved meme such as "heart surgery."



A new or trainee heart surgeon consciously learns the craft, but he/she is also memetically guided by the prior experience of others. Like acting or any trade, this memetic devolvement is best felt to be working when the subject is relaxed and have ‘let themselves go'. The examples of those that did it before us are like invisible spirit guides once we are ‘in the groove'.



Great men may be said to sit on the shoulders of others before them, but so it is with all activity whether it is carpentry, mothering, lying or fighting. No matter how harmful or mundane, others have built tramlines of the mind. In careers, apprentices or trainees can experience this as an arbitrary choice ‘fitting like a glove'. They have discovered an aptitude or just somehow ‘picked it up' without really being able to explain how. In animals of lesser consciousness, this becomes a pure instinct so that all will eat, fight and sleep in a practically identical way.



Is there evidence that learned behavior is carried to others? One example would be when a rat finds its way through a maze. A second rat seems to find its way through the maze even quicker. In experiments, the rats have been killed (to prevent telepathy) or identical new mazes substituted (to prevent scent trails), yet despite this, rats are progressively able to get through these mazes faster than the earlier ones. Where does this knowledge reside? They are able to access a meme that is being built, a meme of knowledge about the maze.



I doubt that a meme is entirely independent of living things, but the crucial thing is that it acts as if it is. A meme has an arc of existence that like the life of a living organism is a self-contained pocket of energy.



Perhaps the best analogy of memes in the world is that they are akin to numbers. The fantastic science of mathematics has enabled us to go to the moon and inspire computers. Yet we wouldn't be able to point to a number or say, "this is a six", we could just say there are six of something. Like memes, we use the concept of number to find linking commonalities and to make something have sense for us. To grasp that which has no obvious handle.



One of my favorite examples of memetics in action is that referred to as the 100th monkey effect. It's covered in Primates 6 (1965), and was about studies of monkeys living on a string of Japanese islands 1952-1958.



What happened was that one monkey started washing the sand off sweet potatoes, and then others started doing it. At some point, a critical mass was reached and even monkeys on other islands, though there was no obvious contact, started washing their food to remove the sand. This is almost a perfect example of a meme growing and then becoming accessible to all. A way for knowledge or learning to become transmitted to others that are not in physical contact. In human affairs, this is best seen in fashion, whereby there just seems to be zeitgeist (spirit of the age) sweeping through disparate and otherwise unconnected populations.



This 100th monkey effect was first popularized in the Lyall Watson book, Lifetide . Another book by Ken Keyes simply called The Hundredth Monkey further propagated this novel idea. Now there have been a few articles that ‘revisit' these experiments (e.g. one from Elaine Myere) but they all seem to miss the point.



These pseudo rebuttals usually harp on about how not all the monkeys adopted this new way of washing sand off potatoes. Now Ken Keyes clearly says in his forward about this phenomenon "…almost all..," so he wasn't claiming a universal spread.



Furthermore, the 100th monkey mechanism isn't negated by this. The skeptics are confusing a hundred monkeys as somehow meaning 100%. Think of a meme such as a fashion. A few people adopt it, perhaps to widespread ridicule but at some threshold point, it becomes widely accepted. Now obviously, not every single person adopts the exact same fashion, but does this detract from the mechanism that causes it's explosive growth? Of course not. Indeed, there will ever be adherents to memes that are other fashions or the antithesis of the one currently in vogue. It can be a bit like the scene in the sci-fi movie Fahrenheit 451 where in a book burning society, individuals each keep a certain book alive by reciting it and memorizing it.



Fashions could be similarly said to be kept alive by adherents. Victims of fashion are the ones held by the meme in a grip that has no hold on other people who have moved on to other fashions.



Critics of memetics I have found, similarly miss the point about statistics. I am not asserting that twins will all have the same experiences or that coincidences can be statistically explained or expected, like the likelihood of two people at a gathering sharing the same birthday. In fact memes explain why not everything will be the same in every case and every time.



What interests me are the coincidences that are so astronomically unlikely that they can't be configured. The one in a billion chance. Which when it happens, deserves some consideration instead of being dismissed as a one-off. These incredible coincidences are amenable to memetic explanation. I'm not claiming that fantastical coincidences are the rule. Indeed, they are the exceptions that prove the rule, but these exceptions have underlying mechanisms that make them so exceptional.



There are other examples of mass learning within species if you don't buy the 100th monkey one. One in particular was the study done on blue tits pecking at foil on milk bottles to get at the milk. Once one or two started doing it, within a short time, blue tits everywhere were doing it.



Another form of memetics in action would be the phenomenon known as the stigmata. On my model, the conscious dwelling on Christ's wounds say by catholics or other christians creates a meme that grows like a cloud that gathers moisture. When it has reached an optimum size, then like lightning, the meme devolves or is discharged upon some unwitting subject. This explains why the stigmata phenomenon can appear on people who aren't especially religious or even Christian.



A padre was made a saint by the pope in 2002, who had displayed the stigmata. Church enquiries couldn't find any evidence of fraud or deception. Indeed the profuse bleeding was deemed of unknown origination. The padre was especially venerated for being one of the clergy that rarely display the phenomenon.



The stigmata that occurs may have a cultural base. When the conception of Christ on the cross, changed from one of him being serene to a more realistic portrayal of the crucifixion, then the stigmata became intermittent though still rare.



Much phenomena that has been described as paranormal, unexplainable or baffling in human affairs has a memetic explanation. The believe in Reincarnation can be explained as people devolving memes built up by others. This is akin to the parable of reaping that which others sow.



The reason most people think they are Cleopatra or some famous character is that a meme has been built by people thinking about these "larger than life" historical personages. I suspect that the person claiming to be a reincarnation has taken onboard several cultural connotations that were embedded into the personage when the meme was being built.



Now there may well be knowledge imparted in a way that only the original person could have known. This is when the meme of a lesser-known person, yet having a meme built up during their own life has devolved upon someone. An example of this seemingly inexplicable phenomena, is say when a murder victim has communicated a vital but overlooked piece of crucial evidence in a dream. This would equate a very vigorous meme with a life of it's own, a soul.



A case where someone knows something they could not have, about a distant town or person is sometimes attributed to reincarnation. Once again however, it is all about meme devolvement.



Evil and goodness are gigantic memes that we can all tap into and use them to power activity. So it is that a bullet easily seems to find an innocent mark, and joy can be brought by simple acts of kindness. These memetic aids to action don't negate our actual free will, but we will find that once a choice has been made, an acceleration that can seem outside ourselves speeds us on.



An analogy or model of how we devolve memes that I like to use is that of a funfair dodgem ride. We are all connected to a gigantic grid with our minds. Now this could be Jung's collective unconscious, or a species wide area network or Sheldrake's morphic field but whatever we choose to call this grid that seems to link us all, we sometimes derive power from it and sometimes not. The sparks can fly but our action is sometimes hesitant and sometimes swift. All analogies limp and this one doesn't allow for the cars to sometimes put power into the grid but this model is useful to see how we can be linked but separate to a larger force.



Because of our memetic nature, whatever mental paths we follow, it will always be amenable to memes. Some memeticists treat memes as an infective virus and although some are devolved unwillingly and unconsciously, I don't find it helpful to use this model of contagion. Even when we have a meme that we identify and get rid of, we still have others at work albeit unidentified.



Whether memes use individuals as entry points or rain en masse upon numerous subjects, there always seem to be loci, some nodal points of focus.



PXF nodes



In the previous section, I concentrated on individual devolvement of memes. I'd now like to express some thoughts on mass devolvement. This can be a lot of memes on one person or a lot of people devolving a similar meme. This memotype can be viewed as an overlay upon the genotype. This may produce an interference pattern that provides certain nodes of contact. These nodes then become the epicenter for memes to ripple outward and whether this model is accurate or not, we have to accept that memes or new ideas have to start somewhere.



Irony is a good indicator of memetic action. Unfortunately it is usually only in retrospect that we are made aware of it. I'll come back to irony shortly.



A major devolvement of memes is something I call a PXF node . This is applauded when it is a creative flowering of the arts, and disdained (by others) when it is say a militant nationalistic chauvinism. I use the letters PXF just to show that there are multiple conduits, such as with an art-movement.



Impressionism started, and France back then became a PXF node for artistic excellence. Paris especially became a focus for painters and the success of the few was fuelled by the dreams of the many.



In a smaller way, you can see this phenomena when a music scene erupts into wider popularity. Once it was Liverpool and more recently it was Seattle. A cynic would say that the big success of one band such as the Beatles or Nirvana enabled other bands from the region to get signed to big labels, on their coat-tails. A memeticist would say that a muse or a pipeline of musical talent devolved upon the region that enabled everyone on that scene to become world class.



Bubba Sparxx rapped, "Rhyming chose me." Popular artists can incarnate memes and lead trends. By devolving the memes of the zeitgeist, they become a focus for the devotion and adulation representing it. John Lennon said at one point that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, though that backfired somewhat.



A few artists devolved the memes of world class artistry which had a wider fallout. This then gets classified as a whole art movement. A doubter would say that the artists themselves are their own crucible forging an intellectual passion and using each other to inspire greater works. A memeticist would say the presence of a PXF node sucked in the memes that created a vast advance in that time and place. This feel of the universe flowing thru them was something that many then sensed and rose to the occasion. I think people can be attuned and be able to predict these ripples, these memetic effects. Very few are radically able to do it in a predictive or even an overtly useful way. Whether this is a skill or circumstance, every now and again we see rapid advances or creative flowerings.



A famous artist can often be a PXF node embodiment. Since their lives are usually detailed, you can spot the ironies/coincidences presaging their own induction into cultural icon-hood. These PXF nodes can also be a non-living icon too, such as the flag or a city symbol, that become almost a memetic deity.



The devolvement of memes upon inanimate objects is what would normally be classed as miraculous phenomena. Now this belongs in the advanced thinking on memetics and for now I'll just make a couple of suggestions like weeping statuary that are examples of this. We anthropomorphize the moon (‘the man in the moon') or the face on Mars, but could some memetic terra-forming be helping the process along?



This is all fantastic stuff but let's not forget the more prosaic everyday things. Memes are in ordinary things, like having a meme of ‘watching television' or even toilet habits that people do without any thought as to where the behavior came from. Most people can't be so analytical or self referential and live a "normal" life, so they don't get philosophical about everything.



When a person becomes aware of memetic influences, then I think you can use them without trying too hard to use them. You kind of decide what you want in the back of your mind without lust of result. Then later, when you've forgotten almost about it, an opportunity will enable you to get the thing you wanted. An example might be that I want a red mustang say. So I don't dwell on it or peruse the car sales. Then when I've no longer a conscious yearning for it, I'll see a bargain priced one or a friend will offer to loan me one or something along those lines. This can seem magical or mystical and coincidental, but is how memetics works.



Irony



Irony is a by-product of the reaction of memes upon our lives. Memes are dynamic and attracted to certain conductors, they cause a reaction that can leave irony in it's wake.



Irony can seem like just one of those things but as an ironical twist of fate can quickly demonstrate, you ignore its potential at some risk. I'm sure that Christopher Reeve, the actor that played Superman and now finds himself a cripple has ruminated about irony.



Ironical things can happen because our mental life isn't static. I would say that even when nothing much seems to be going on, the dynamism of memes are affecting our lives. You can do an experiment to show this dynamism of memes. For instance, think a few seconds about something that you don't necessarily encounter... say for example UFOs. Alright, you think a minute then forget about it. Right, at the point you just about forget about them and only your unconscious brain retains the thought, then a meme will attach to attract other examples of what it is you was thinking about. I know this sounds esoteric, but it is how life imitates art. So anyway, within a few days there should be references that you come across pertaining to the thought. This might be a trailer on TV or a conversation with a friend, and when you get really good at it, there will be myriad coincidences of this sort and it will seem like you are almost creating the universe as you go along.



Of course unless you are on LSD or something, we rarely achieve this flow. Ironically the opposite of that which we intended can happen. Irony is often an indicator of memes in action. Because of what I believe about memes inoculating themselves, a good meme can appear sometimes to be a bad one and vice versa. This is an ironical twist in that to achieve a result you have to take a course that seems to lead away from it. Like the legend of the Holy Grail, those that seek it won't find it.



My take on actions leading to unintended results is that memes naturally contain their opposite. This seems contradictory but when you create a meme like a theory or a business, the successful meme inoculates itself by incorporating it's opposite. Like the exception that proves the rule, the universe can seem to be governed by a cosmic joker. This leads psychologists to postulate ‘death wishes' or indeed all kinds of stuff that would seem counter productive to long life.



Irony is with us in many mundane ways but we are blind to it. An action we take to avoid something can often precipitate the very thing we wish to avoid. A dramatic example of this could be the lady who was worried by gas pressure fluctuations. She decided to replace it with an electric oven but it was faulty and exploded killing her. A true story from the 1980's I read about. Now usually, our ironies aren't as final but neither so well documented. If you look for irony and coincidence without lust of result, you can find them. On a personal level, I might think of someone and then see on television, a city where we once were. Not a radical irony but typical of mundane ones.



An example of mundane irony is when Ted Heath was prime minister of England. For reasons I forget, he was nicknamed "The Grocer" or "Grocer Heath." He was succeeded to the party leadership by Margaret Thatcher , a bona fide grocer's daughter.



Politics is often rich in irony. Someone helped to power is often the nemesis of the helper. Shades of biting the hand that feeds you! On a personal level, it seems to me that political systems that are supposedly for the benefit of most people, actually benefit the least such as communism. Whereas the ostensibly greedy system of capitalism seems to have wide ranging benefits for all. Now that's just my personal belief, not an ax I'm grinding as part of memetic theory but consider this. If it wasn't for some greedy avid collector of certain artifacts (say Greek urns or Russian ikons), then the coherent collection of artifacts that is often bequeathed to a museum and for public display would not have been assembled.



Another example, a personal irony, was when I bought a cheap retread for a tire at a distant location from my home in 1988. A few weeks went by, and on the freeway a brown cloud and a bang informed me that something serious had happened. I thought it was the engine at first and miraculously skewed across four lanes and down an exit ramp coming to a stop outside the very tire sellers I'd bought the now disintegrated tire.



I've had several "confirming experiences" that show irony and coincidence and memetic flow to have combined threads. Usually, I can demo this to others by asking them to describe a phenomenon that they don't understand and then give a memetic explanation. Another way is to listen to someone talk and then predict some irony that may only become apparent in retrospect.



Name pairings and attractions can be often seen as ironic. What this shows is that concepts and connotations that we put names to have a kinetic life and interaction. Memetic attachments echo down the ages regularly and take us by surprise. Such as an unexplained block of ice from the sky falling upon the car of an anomalous weather researcher. Even memeticists aren't immune to irony or the whims of fate but are better placed to explain them. Hidden connotations in wordplay can generate irony. Let's say someone is unconscious of a name's hidden meaning or heritage or even an anagram of it, they can devolve memes to do with it. A kind of memetic pull steers their destiny without them being aware of it.



The devolution of unbidden memes has serious implications for what we consider to be our free will. It's one thing for a meme to help us do something, and another thing for us to do something because a meme has been devolved.



Free will



Memes by their action on unaware human carriers would also seem to sometimes "choose" their carriers. Like fame, some people are born with memes, some achieve them, and others have them thrust upon them. Like the stigmata phenomena, or other groupings of similar phenomena, the person on whom the it impinges can seem unwilling to carry the meme. A natural leader could deny his calling until (like the sword in the stone), there is no other choice.



The Hobson's choice of all destiny may well appear to be a choice to ourselves but actually not. As in the selfish gene book, much behavior that seems to be altruistic or some such can be the opposite of what was conceived to be. The Selfish Gene had a lot about selfish behavior being seemingly altruistic due to memes and I would further that line and say that much of what we think of as free will is actually not.



Phenomena such as simultaneous discovery, either of a theory or a device would make it feasible that ideas outside ourselves are just waiting to be grabbed. Composers and musicians especially subscribe to the theory that a muse inspires them and blesses them by having a tune just pop into their head. Scientists and inventors describe a similar process of inspiration. Kekule was trying to figure out the structure of benzene when he dreamt of a snake eating it's own tail and then realized only a ring could explain it's molecular form. Calculus was a mathematical theory simultaneously developed independently by both Newton and Leibniz.



Whilst there will always be physicists working towards similar goals, there are enough examples of inspiration to suspect that memes can be handed down. When simultaneous discoveries happen, you might suspect a scattergun approach. Or maybe it's just the non-locality of human mental events? This non-local suggestion is surely how one's learning can be transferred to an unconnected other. It is the very heart of this memetics.



Just as quantum mechanics has had to use concepts of non-locality with Bell's theorem , so memetics has a corresponding echo.



This meme devolving upon unwitting subjects concept can be added to our interdependence on others and us all being victims of circumstance to suggest that perhaps "moral stance" is our only true area of free will. It's possible that memes choose us rather than the other way round, and I would like to develop experiments or tests that investigate this hypothesis. Possibly studies of large families may shed some clues in this area, as I've been fascinated how large families can often contain both a crook and a cop. When we say that in life, we have to play the cards that we're dealt, memetics may indeed show this to be truth. Devolving memes may determine our options more than we could normally accept. What we rationally consider to be ourselves, may be nothing more than a list of consumer choices intertwined with moral ones.



Consider an artist or songwriter. They have often described the muse as choosing them. Many songwriters and composers have described the song or music just coming into their head, and they merely wrote it down. Many scientific breakthroughs or other inspirational thinking has come upon people by dreams or whilst they were in a relaxed reflective mood. Typical examples might be Archimedes jumping out of his bath, and running naked down the street and yelling "Eureka," or Newton having an apple fall on his head etc, etc….



A child prodigy that composes music may simply be abler at accessing a bank of musical information. All this would imply that memes could have an independent existence and source other than ourselves. This is another area that needs careful consideration and research, although the above examples may simply be forms of facilitating human invention and not remotely associated with devolving memes.



If living in London, is drinking water that has already been drunk before, and Los Angeles is breathing someone else's exhaust, could thinking on an idea be thinking something that's already been thunk? "There's nothing new under the sun," goes the old saw, and those that don't remember history are condemned to repeat it. But what if a burgeoning population actually allows new ideas to thrive, to provide a wider base for supporting memes? Perhaps a larger world of people allows more progressions to be devolved?



Having intimated that memes may choose us, people do seem able to attract certain memes. Whether a person has to be reflective or have a high sense of self-consciousness or awareness of self, is not clear. Like ‘greatness', some people seem to be born with some memes, others achieve them and others have them thrust upon them. A fruitful area of investigation would be the nature of invention or genius. To try and ascertain whether the subject considers the source of his or her inspiration as within or without themselves.



This new broad theory suggests many areas of research. The explanatory power of it, should cause us to re-examine areas that would be considered irrelevant or unimportant by those blind to the many ways that we do seem able to influence the world around us. Pubescent girls are often present at the site of poltergeist phenomena, and though this an unproven link, could it not be that we can all have an effect, albeit of a much less dramatic nature, on our immediate world. I suspect that memes devolve and can be attracted, without any of us being aware of how and why. Through reflection and self-consciousness, we can transcend this memetic determinism and maybe even move mountains or work miracles with understanding and a little bit of faith.



There are ways that we can create our own "luck." It could be construed as God helping those that help themselves or it could be we all have the ability to bend reality to our advantage. I certainly believe that any of us can attract references or phenomena associated with something that is ‘on our mind'. You can do a simple test to show this. Think of something incongruous like a first world war soldier, something that you wouldn't normally think about or come across. Think of this subject several times during the day. Now very shortly (usually a three day window) thereafter, I've personally found several references to whatever it was I thought about. Maybe it was just a magazine in the newsagents or a TV advert or someone discussing the subject. Now I know this can sound a bit like hoodoo voodoo or sympathetic magic, but it is a very simple test anyone can do that shows the fabric of memetic correspondence.



This is also the reason that a customs officer knows a smuggler without really knowing why a hunch works. This is why people who lose a wedding ring can catch the very fish that swallowed it or cook it for dinner. Or a man studying unusual weather can have a block of ice, fall onto his car. Perhaps why lovers were made for each other.



Some people have a developed lightning rod that attracts phenomena. We might tag them "lucky" or "unlucky," or just marvel at how certain things always seem to happen to them.



Some people may even be able to create their own reality. Haven't we all had the experience of wanting something (say a particular color and model of a car) and just about when we've given up hope of finding one at a price we can afford, a friend of a friend turns up with one at a deal of a price. This potential to affect the world in ways that we wish things to be may be an evolutionary strategy. Is it only wish fulfillment or is it something else? When I see a bluebottle housefly wait patiently on a door to enter the house, is it a tactic or does it instigate what will happen? It would seem unlikely that a fly could influence the future, but memetics can be a kind of wish fulfillment that has an actual reality with time. Not always wishes. When a train crashes, ironically a year to the day after another crash, Could this have been a consequence of many minds having dwelt upon the subject?

A stigmata upon society?

Maybe the superstitions about speaking no evil are based upon a memetic truth? Whether memes choose us more than we choose them, has got to be the most interesting area of memetic research. Memes have been regarded as evolutionary tools in their narrow sense, but their role in a broader sense can be ever so much more dramatic for evolution.



Evolution



Memetics offers a way to reconcile simple creationism with Darwinism . Evolutionary advances are not contradicted by divine dispensation. The lack of a fossil record of missing links has always been a problem with evolutionary theory, and Creationists feel there are many aspects of life that point to an intelligent designer. A site that lists some of these anthropomorphic coincidences from a physicist's point of view is here . This will be too technical for most people and what appeals generally as a designer argument is how well adapted are the varieties of life upon this planet. The fossil record such as of dinosaurs shows that there were once animals that no longer exist, now whether these were one-off creations or have evolved into something else is a debate that has no absolute answer. If they did evolve into say birds, the jump to another shape must have been sudden as there are no intermediate species. Memetics offers a way to explain the mechanism of evolutionary jumps.



Darwin's survival of the fittest has explained the variations within species, such as why dark butterflies may have an advantage over light ones during the industrial revolution. But there are many areas unexplained. Why for instance have all the mammals we are familiar with, reached an evolutionary plateau? A Darwinian might say that the changes are so gradual, that we can't see them. Yet many life-forms have remained static for millennia. Fish like the coelacanth, once thought to be an extinct ancestor of today's fish are regularly dredged up from the deep. They have remained unchanged for thousands if not millions of years, as the fossil record shows. Also, it's incredibly difficult to see exactly how an animal can survive and prosper if it hasn't reached their optimum evolutionary potential. How for instance could a spider evolve it's complex web spinning mechanism? It either had it or it didn't, as spinning a useless web on the way to evolving an effective one, seems peculiar. In fact, evolution seems to have made sudden gigantic leaps rather than gradual ones over eons. The black obelisk of Clarke and Kubrick's 2001 that triggers a new evolutionary phase seems unlikely but may have more of a ring of truth about it than Darwin's theory. My favorite Darwin story is that when he returned home after two years from his travels, his father marveled and exclaimed, "The shape of his head is completely different!" Recently a pine tree has been discovered in Australia's Blue mountains, near Katoomba. It has remained unchanged and is the same as fossils from 150 million years ago. Kind of knocks the idea of evolving life into a cocked hat I would say. Now within a species, we can easily see how the environment may favor dark or light moths and so such characteristics become prevalent. But the big thrust of evolutionists that life is constantly evolving simply isn't borne out..



The theory of Lamarckism was subsumed by the Darwinian model, but claimed that acquired characteristics could be inherited. So for instance, the Lamarckian would say that if I were a carpenter, then my son would be better able to handle wood. Now actually, the memetic model has an affinity with Lamarckism , but the difference is that characteristics are not necessarily inherited. They can be passed through a bloodline, but they can just as easily be transferred to someone that isn't related. This theory of memetics can explain the discrepancies that Lamarck couldn't.



How this could work in practice is that a species wide desire can translate into an evolutionary jump. Let's say that we had a high level of consciousness but were restricted to the body of a fly on a door. Our self-awareness would be limited to that of our experience, but we could form a rudimentary desire for the door to open. This would create a meme that could enact a progression of events that gave us what we wanted, or alternatively it could manifest a species wide evolutionary jump that caused us to develop door opening tools like arms and legs.



These assertions are less amenable to research than some of the other aspects of memetic theory. However, I display them here to show just how radical a paradigm shift would be, once we accept the reality of memes.



When something has been described as instinctual, there seems never an explanation of how this mechanism works. Memetics explains how instinct and innate behaviors operate.



When a school of fish turn as one, or when ants act in consort, we seem willing to accept the existence of a group mind, but what is that if not a meme?



Evolutionists themselves are starting to express that evolution has a lot of problems as a theory. Not the least of which is a lack of evidence. Recent thinkers on the subject such as Stephen Jay Gould examined the Burgess shale , a strata of fossils and found co-existing species, and a plethora of life forms that casts doubt on the idea that complex life has arisen out of more simple life from eons ago. They were always complex.



My memetics can explain the emergence of differing species as a series of jumps that utilize species wide memes. So there are vestiges of species in other species but no discernable evolutionary transition.



Anyway, here from an anti-evolution tract are some quotes from scientists that spell out many of the problems with evolution as an acceptable theory: "The pathetic thing is that we have scientists who are trying to prove evolution, which no scientist can ever prove." [Dr. Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize winner and eminent evolutionist ]



"The theory of evolution suffers from grave defects, which are more and more apparent as time advances. It can no longer square with practical scientific knowledge." [Dr. A. Fleishmann, Zoologist, Erlangen University]



"It is good to keep in mind... that nobody has ever succeeded in producing even one new species by the accumulation of micro-mutations. Darwin's theory of natural selection has never had any proof, yet it has been universally accepted." [Professor R. Goldschmidt, Ph.D., DSc Prof. Zoology, University of California, in Material Basis of Evolution, Yale University Press.]



"It is easy enough to make up stories, of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test." [Luther D. Sutherland, Darwin's Enigma, Master Books 1988, page 89.]



"Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which - a functional protein or gene - is complex beyond... anything produced by the intelligence of man?" [Michael Denton, molecular biologist, Evolutionist: A Theory in Crisis (London: Burnett Books, 1985 ) page 342.]



"When I make an incision with my scalpel, I see organs of such intricacy that there simply hasn't been enough time for natural evolutionary processes to have developed them." [C. Everett Koop, former U.S. Surgeon General.]



"Modern apes...seem to have sprung out of nowhere. They have no yesterday, no fossil record. And the true origin of modern humans...is, if we are to be honest with ourselves, an equally mysterious matter." [Lyall Watson, Ph.D., evolutionist.]



"Although bacteria are tiny, they display biochemical, structural and behavioral complexities that outstrip scientific description. In keeping with the current microelectronics revolution, it may make more sense to equate their size with sophistication rather than with simplicity...Without bacteria, life on earth could not exist in its present form." [James A. Shipiro, "Bacteria as Multicellular Organisms," Scientific American, vol. 258, no. 6, June, 1988.]



"That a mindless, purposeless, chance process such as natural selection, acting on the sequels of recombinant DNA or random mutation, most of which are injurious or fatal, could fabricate such complexity and organization as the vertebrate eye, where each component part must carry out its own distinctive task in a harmoniously functioning optical unit, is inconceivable. The absence of transitional forms between the invertebrates retina and that of the vertebrates poses another difficulty. Here there is a great gulf fixed which remains inviolate with no seeming likelihood of ever being bridged. The total picture speaks of intelligent creative design of an infinitely higher order." [H.S. Hamilton, M.D., The Retina of the Eye--An Evolutionary Road Block.]



"My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed." [N.H. Nilson, famous botanist and evolutionist.] "None of five museum officials could offer a single example of a transitional series of fossilized organisms that would document the transformation of one basically different type to another." [Luther Sunderland, science researcher.]



"Not one change of species into another is on record...we cannot prove that a single species has been changed." [Charles Darwin, My Life and Letters.]



"[...] most people assume that fossils provide a very important part of the general argument in favor of Darwinian interpretations of the history of life. Unfortunately, this is not strictly true." [Dr. David Raup, Curator of Geology, Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago ]



"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides means of ‘seeing' Evolution, it has provided some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of ‘gaps' in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them." [David Kitts, Ph.D., "Palaeontology and Evolutionary Theory," Evolution, vol. 28, September 1974, page 467.]



"The fact that a theory so vague, so insufficiently verifiable, and so far from the criteria otherwise applied in ‘hard' science has become a dogma can only be explained on sociological grounds." [Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, biologist ]



"Micromutations do occur, but the theory that these alone can account for evolutionary change is either falsified, or else it is an unfalsifiable, hence metaphysical theory. I suppose that nobody will deny that it is a great misfortune if an entire branch of science becomes addicted to a false theory. But this is what has happened in biology....I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science. When this happens many people will pose the question: How did this ever happen?" [S. Lovtrup, Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth, London: Croom Helm, page 422.]



"The uniform, continuous transformation of Hyracotherium into Equus, so dear to the hearts of generations of textbook writers, never happened in nature." [George Simpson, paleontologist and evolutionist]



"As is well known, most fossil species appear instantaneously in the fossil record." [Tom Kemp, Oxford University.]



"The curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps; the fossils are missing in all the important places." [Francis Hitching, archeologist.]



"If Evolution were true, we should find literally millions of fossils that show how one kind of life slowly and gradually changed to another kind of life. But missing links are the trade secret, in a sense, of paleontology. The point is, the links are still missing. What we really find are gaps that sharpen up the boundaries between kinds." [Dr. Gary Parker, biologist/paleontologist and former ardent evolutionist ]



"Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them." [David Kitts, paleontologist and evolutionist ] There are plenty of other quotes that dispute evolution, and not just from creationist or religious perspectives. I suspect that the theory became popularized by secularists and humanists that wanted an alternative (any alternative) to theological thinking. Although widely embraced as seeming likely, there are a number of unanswered questions. Any evolution as such that may have occurred was no gradual incremental sort but a species-wide jump. Biologists have touted mutations as explaining such jumps but mutations don't hold up as such anomalies usually make the organism perform less efficiently or detrimentally. I am not aware of any mutations have ever allowed a creature to operate more successfully. Like the science fiction explanations that create Superman or X-ray man, such mutations are fiction.



Only memes and memetic theory can explain evolutionary jumps.



Memetic Rationality



When a meme devolves, it changes our worldview and thereby our rationality. It is a common assumption that our rationality is constant, but if you look at how people talk or act, you see that consciousness is a major player.



Differing levels of consciousness are more or less varied when it comes to grasping memes. Like a mild form of schizophrenia, our beliefs vary according to our mental state. Many of us may have had the experience of knowing or intending to do something when we are in a particular state such as in love or drunk or otherwise intoxicated. Back to normal, we forget all about it, but when the state is again repeated, we re-remember that which had been closed to us until then. The more time we spend in a particular state, we are constructing another memetic reality of ourselves. Eventually, this new personality can supplant our normal self.



The point I'm making is that rationality is just not the static benchmark that we can refer to. All belief systems can be coherent and all can seem true at certain times. This is why a meme can devolve and not cause a conflict with someone's belief system. You only have to see two antagonists arguing vehemently to realize that there is no time for considered and reasoned responses. Neither are pausing for breath and mustering arguments. Both are aware of the other's mutually exclusive viewpoint, and instinctively shoot from the lip.



Hypnotism also demonstrates the myth of objective rationality. When a hypnotized subject explains why they did something upon a prompt, there is no shortage of inventive rationales that would usually be acceptable, were we not already aware of the speaker's hypnotized state. In a similar manner, we could claim that anyone is hypnotized by the beliefs that they have adopted. The phrases of rational justification can colorfully reflect a worldview. Many turns of phrase today, have derived from the rural norms of yesteryear. We could be described as "sitting on a fence," or be ‘closing the door after the horse has bolted' and the like. All this indicates that we are being used by a rationale rather more than we are using it. And one day we may even be able to claim that people have been hypnotized by the memes that have devolved upon them.



Our commonly accepted notions of rationality is that we are confronted with events or phenomena and after consideration, choose the most rational or the one that fits most evidence. I would say this is incorrect and that rationality is a way of filtering out evidence that doesn't fit. We act more like a prosecuting lawyer than any judge and cherry-pick testimony and evidence that supports our case. The stuff that detracts from our position we castigate. It has evolved this way as an evolutionary stratagem to come to quick decisions for action. Instead of weighing evidence, we make an emotional decision on what is right and then look for indications that this is true.



Psychology shows over and over that people do things for reasons different to what they say. The depth and ingenuity of reasoning from hypnotized or angry subjects upon a prompt no matter how ridiculous show that justifications can be a sham. Reasoning like rhetoric or oratory can be more parts emotion than logic, and even when seemingly unemotional is simply an instinctive defense of someone's position. There are ever arguments for and against every position. In reality you feel or sense the right answer. We choose our rationality and thereby choose our answers. We can within bounds decide one thing or another, but people could never explicate their starting premises before a reasoned discussion. If we could agree upon common assumptions and proceed from there, we could rate belief by rankings as a sports table. Criteria such as logic, inner coherence or explanatory power could be used to rate theories just as we can acknowledge Arsenal as a top football team within the football league.



Rational thinking is often a wolf in sheep's clothing because it can seem innocuous and not linked to the profounder sense of self, but they are always inextricably linked. This personal dimension often renders real debate unlikely. Rather than weighing testimony, the person arguing a position is acting more as a defense or prosecuting lawyer, using only arguments that support their case. This isn't really seeking truth but conviction.



If a person was really seeking understanding or truth, they would have to come up with a scenario or evidence that would disprove their position. To truly test a belief you have to know or acknowledge what would falsify it.



Memetics is for people that are honestly excited by an idea. It's okay to acknowledge that you can accept it because it fits in with how you feel about something. Those that revere long lengthy reasoning as if they are a judge will find the case for memetics here. They think they are interviewing this theory for a place in their rationality but memetics by its very nature is something you will accept quickly or never can.



Correspondence and Echoes



As I claimed earlier, all coincidence is a form of memetic correspondence. We can see this correspondence in things that aren't especially coincidental. I'll give you an example that I noticed when I lived in Ocean Park in the mid 80's. There was a lot of ‘street people' in the area and especially on an evening, you would come across several grubbed out people mumbling, talking and outright ranting to themselves. They were in their own private world that excluded the passers by. Now fast forward several years beyond the gentrification and yuppiefication of the area, where property prices had soared. Visiting Main Street, I was surprised to find numerous people walking and talking on mobile phones in their own little world. Most staggeringly, I saw someone yelling (though with a mobile ear piece) at the very same spot that a notorious drunk, a street alcoholic had once staked out as his patch. It's not really a coincidence, but it is an echo. Perhaps certain places can attract or devolve a meme that recurs in certain actions?

Perhaps certain places are much more amenable to holiness or criminality so that there is an architecture that shapes our behavior? Going up a mountain and coming down with a changed memetic reality may have truth. A sense of place may very well be necessary for certain memes to be devolved. These are certain areas that need to be considered. However, this is certainly not an absolute occurrence. I've visited many spots reputed for their evil connections such as a haunted room or murder location or site of a Nazi rally, but have not detected any sense of evil there. They are usually remarkably benign or innocuous in their sense of place.



However rare it is that a place can affect one's rationality, I do believe that it does happen. Another example that I can offer is when as an "inter-railer" round Europe, I slept on the beach at Eze-sur-mer. For a diversion, I took the deserted footpath to the hilltop village of Eze one day and felt intellectually charged. Nothing revelatory, just a vivid afternoon that was possibly the highlight of my whole trip. Many years later, by one of those happenstance references, I discovered that the trail was also once known as Nietzsche's path from when the philosopher used to walk it. Apparently he wrote the latter chunk of Thus Spoke Zarathustra amongst the olives and pines there. When you reach the top after over an hour's walk, you are bamboozled by the sudden bustle, but lower down I felt connected to something outside of myself.



The cycles of life are rarely viewed as something that recurs in all generations and times. Love is an emotion that is intensely experienced by each generation as if for the first time. Only those that can take a step back through wisdom or age can see the constantly recurring tides.



This is where memetics is able to provide explanations for the puzzle. This tide, this governing of life, the recurring of events is a correspondence that echoes through all generations. For instance, we think we might have left the bacchanalian rites of village festivals behind, but really all we have done is supplanted them. Package holidays of booze and sex are just an evolved echo of what was and always will be.



Anytime we see an echo or correspondence, especially in things or events that we normally would not consider related, we are seeing the action of a meme.



When the lifestyle aggregation of music, fashion and outlook called ‘punk' started, it really seemed to spread during 1978. I went to the USA that summer and hitch-hiked about. One thing that puzzled me was that I kept running into people who seemed to be ‘punk' yet had not yet heard of the term. They had the philosophy, torn or bound clothing and sometimes the spiky hairstyle, yet they hadn't yet heard of the ‘Sex Pistols'. I suspected some kind of cosmic con especially when I met one guy almost a clone of Sid Vicious that insisted he'd never heard of him. How was it possible that people had adopted a fashion in advance of widespread media attention? With this phenomenon to ponder, I started developing my "one in every town" theory. I postulated that every small town has a drunk, a real redneck, a punk kid etc. As the towns get larger, the cast of characters increase. Added to this was the strange sense of déjà vu when I met someone that was 90% of somebody else I'd met or the spitting image of someone from my hometown. I was regularly surprised to find a Dave who liked wrangler clothes, drank hard and had a girlfriend called Sue just like someone else I'd already met. I started to make boyfriend/girlfriend name pairings that seemed to recur often enough to seem a standard. If I met a "Carl," I'd guess he had a girlfriend called Sarah before he told me he did. In life, there are all manner of possible permutations or simple juxtapositions, but memes can make them into regular pairing; a temporary bondage.



Each bar I went in, had its resident lush and a "Mr. can get it." Each place I went had the same types of people. I'd talk about this phenomenon with friends and claim "there's one in every town." Like a hen's pecking order, I've come to realize that human types are similarly governed. You remove one and another will take up that role.



A startling possibility is that if certain memes can be linked with certain places, then there's no reason that memes couldn't become attached to certain genes.



Memes are across all racial lines, and I've noticed a line of eye or a distinctive quirk in someone fresh out the jungle that has reminded me of a sophisticated urban acquaintance. We have more in common than we have differences, though I suspect traits and tendencies along family bloodlines can be cemented into place by memetic action.



A memetic template that guides developing phenomena would not be impossible. A meme is what gives certain characteristics to a social development as a gene can choose genetic characteristics. We can't see the meme but we may well be able to test for its operation. There could well be a meme that guides physical similarities as diverse as a river pattern and blood capillaries and the veins of a leaf. There is often a correspondence across many fields that could denote a meme governing the patterns that we usually dismiss as too diverse to be related.



Memes and genes may be linked in ways we have yet to even fathom. On April 12th 2002, I was struck by a news report about an Englishman stabbed to death in Orleans, France. He had gone there for the funeral of his daughter, killed by a hit and run driver. This unfortunate coincidence of two killed separately would make me suspect a intertwining of their family with France and with death. I have not researched it, but would fully expect that their ancestors would have also experienced this tragic combination. I would have expected that prior family members had been killed in France during the world wars or the Napoleonic and 100 years war. I would bet money that somewhere in the past, there is a mortal French connection.



Throughout history, we have stories of cursed objects or very unlucky things that somehow are imbued with tragedy. Earlier I mentioned the 2001 Selby train crash. Only in the Scottish Herald, as far as I know, was that some of that train's carriages had also been involved in a prior fatal train crash in London. Memes and places and things and genes are all up for consideration.



Memes are probably the reason for unusual physical effects that we sometimes see. In nature we see all kinds of odd mimicry. We can easily appreciate the defensive potential of a moth that has cat's eyes on its wings, but are harder put to explain the advantage of some other similarities. Those nuts that resemble a woman's thighs are only native to a few islands and are remarkable. More profuse are the shells, clams and flowers that can resemble sex organs. Quite how memes can cause a physical form, is similar to the idea of them being a template. So it is that some couples can grow to resemble each other, or there is a marked similarity between owners and their pets.



As well as living things, we can also see the meme operate as a template on inanimate matter. Did the man in the moon arise as a terra-formed response to our anthropomorphic tendencies? Thousands of years may have been necessary, but then what of the face on Mars?



Perhaps the clouds reflect the preoccupations of the people below? On a round-Europe train trip, I saw the outstretched wing of an angel in clouds above Spain. A Catholic type angel at that. Over Bavaria, I noted foaming beer steins, yet in Portugal, the clouds all looked like the tunny fish so important to the local economy. The mashed potato style of clouds became the puffy faces of trolls over Norway and as the train moved to the arctic circle, the sky seemed closer with striated wisps of wizard beards as if drawn by Blake. Of course, the lucid quality of a trip spent sleeping on trains helped observations such as these. But let me mention a curious cloud-play I saw on Manhattan Island.



I'd been out and about late and had no particular place to go. Being a warm night, I decided to sleep on some clean cardboard in an alley. The predawn trash trucks woke me, and I looked up into an owl made by clouds. Round holes for eyes each contained a single twinkling star, and the high buildings framed the owl in a picture-perfect manner. It was an interesting image but I hadn't dwelt upon it for many years until one day I read something about the original Indians of Manhattan by chance. It said that an owl was the spirit that ruled the island.



Coincidence undoubtedly, yet as I said earlier, all coincidence is just a correspondence in the memetic fabric. Perhaps the owl now manifests itself through numerous people that wear round glasses without really understanding their preference?



Another phenomena that has an echo which I've noticed would seem to be a statistical pattern. In a way that I haven't yet defined, I believe a memetic template or pattern is at work. I'm thinking about a crowd at a football match and some evenly distributed actions of this crowd such as lighting cigarettes. Back when I was a child and at a football match, more people seemed to smoke in those days. At an evening game you would see a constant distribution of flickers in the mass of the crowd as individuals lit cigarettes. Even then, I would ponder at how a flicker here would be followed by a flicker over there. There was never an uneven pattern in one area of the crowd mass, and the flames from lighters in use would be evenly distributed despite assumedly a random component. A statistician would probably accept this marvel as simple statistical truth and I can understand it somewhat. But imagine my surprise a generation later when people didn't smoke as much but I saw an echo of this pattern at a game. Within the mass of spectators were flashes from cameras. A flash in one area would be followed by a flash down there and then at another place. While I realize this even distribution has a statistical explanation, I can't help thinking that this random cohesion is part of a memetic template that governs the behavior of crowds.



An example of a memetic template is that what we call "culture." A "tailgate party" would be a type of memetic culture and from Maine to San Diego or wherever Americans have gathered for a tailgate party, there will be parallels or echoes of similarity there. When Britain stamped out an empire in wildly different locations, there was always that memetic template ensuring a correspondence that echoed in snooker clubs, churches and train stations wherever they were. These templates are just a device to make the action of memes more understandable to us, yet there are repeated patterns that recur often enough to suspect that "Britishness" or "American" or indeed any cultural attribute is factory produced.



Cultural attributes have many links and connotations, though even without an enunciated list, we are able to describe something as French style or as typically Japanese. So for now, let's just look at something with minimal links. Simple recurring pairings may give memetic insights.



Pairings



I mentioned how certain name pairings can seem not just fashionable but linked often enough to suspect a meme is helping along the bond. A Jack and Diane, a Carl and Sarah can be linked not just as couples, but as siblings or work combinations or as a parent and child. There seems to be a zeitgeist, a sort of memetic glue that ensures these combinations happen in one form if not the other. This glue isn't permanent but does seem to exist for a certain period of cultural time. This cultural playing field could be useful for mapping memes though it is unlikely to be as clear as florescent lines upon a dark background. Memes can act as molecules either attaching themselves to preferred objects, people and phenomena and perhaps they are the cement that brings things together.



A fisherman that senses his catch of fish or there being a girl for every boy are things that can be helped to come together by memes. This would then be why certain pairings tend to recur.



When Armand Hammer acquired the company called Arm and Hammer , was this bringing together enhanced by memes or simple linguistic coincidence? He undoubtedly wanted to acquire it because it resembled his name so much. Since this was a one-off, I can't press this as an example of memetic pairing, though I think it can indicate other more mundane sound-alike groupings.



Headline writers use this sound-alike device all the time, as do poets and rap artists that rhyme a person to a sound-alike activity. The interesting question for me is whether destiny can have a gravitational pull, and along the direction of a sound-alike word?



Sound-alike destiny apart, there are other pairings that seem coincidentally or unusually attracted to each other. For instance, an incident at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. It was written about by Ted Morgan in Literary Outlaw (pg 446). Jean Genet was pursued by police at a street riot and ran into an apartment building to escape. He knocked upon a door at random exclaiming, "C'est Monsieur Genet." It turned out to be the apartment of a graduate student writing a thesis on him and his writing. Such incidents are frequently dismissed as coincidence. Yet coincidences happen often enough that we can examine them for insight.



Coincidence



We all are subject to trivial coincidences that don't portend or really indicate anything. It is the nature of mathematics to show us a form, a pattern in something we thought to be formless. For instance I had a friend that I'd see irregularly with no especial agenda or set activity, just meet up or visit every now and again. Looking back in an old diary, I was amazed to find that we had got together on the 27th of every month yet not for any conscious reason. This kind of pattern doesn't really mean anything yet there are coincidental patterns that may indicate memes. Folk wisdom has it that events can come in threes, and folk wisdom in general may well indicate phenomena that can be investigated for memetic patterns.



Coincidences almost by definition happen in an unconscious way. As I have claimed earlier, memes operate better when they aren't focused upon. When we are unaware of their influence, we are repeatedly surprised by memetic action.



Synchronicity, fortunate happenstance, serendipity and coincidence are all part of memetic correspondence. It is memetics that links related events and the force that reconciles separated parts as when a submariner finds his old hairbrush on a suburban beach thousands of miles away from where his submarine had been torpedoed and he barely escaped with his life. It is this memetic force that makes the hairs on the back of a customs officer's neck stand on end when in the presence of a smuggler irrespective of any real clues. When a wife loses a wedding ring and it turns up in a fish dinner is another example of which there are many documented cases. These are coincidences that are repeatedly dismissed as one-offs yet recur regularly enough to make an astute person suspect a real force at work.



I well understand the marvels of statistics and how in a roomful of people, it is likely that two will share a birthday. These are not the type of coincidences that I class as indicative of memetic action.



The kind that of coincidences that I am interested in are the ones that seem so unlikely that you wouldn't even make them up. Stuff like the 1911 slaying of Sir Edmund of Greenberry Hill. Unaware of the man's identity, the killers proved to be three men called Green, Berry and Hill.



The correspondences between the presidency and assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy have long been commented upon. Stuff like the killer going from a theatre to a library and vice-versa to correspondences between dates to secretarial names to both presidents having been in Monroe the week before are funny and fascinating. Uncanny you might say, but the plethora of linkage to me shows that a memetic groove of sorts had been worn.



The mechanistic models I've seen trying to portray memes in action usually look like an oversimplified flow-chart. Personally I find models of action to be missing the point. A bit like theologians debating how many angels will fit on a pinhead. They are reaching for a visibility that will elude.



I do use models though strictly for illustrative purposes. They are like those gaming machines that are labeled "For Entertainment Purposes Only." Whether one has more truth to it than another isn't that important because I find the subjective component gets in the way without proving anything.



My preferred model for an established meme is that of a plate resting upon a table. The plate is only ever in physical contact with a few molecules, and if one should drop away, then another one is always to hand. This is helpful to illustrate how a meme, can be supported by only a few members of society. Furthermore it shows how it doesn't rely on any specific group or geographically close supporters for it to stay supported.



My model for phenomena like the stigmata is different but also classed as memetically governed. Here the meme is akin to a cloud that grows. Instead of gathering moisture, it is gathering of mental energy derived from the devout dwelling upon the wounds of Christ. This cloud of energy grows until an optimum size is reached which provokes a discharge like lightning that goes to ground upon some hapless unwitting bystander. This model can explain luck or destiny in that it is the dreams of the many that fuel the success of the few.



Remember that I am not claiming these models as absolute. I am just using a way to make memetics more amenable to the curious.



Life Imitating Art



We often think that art imitates and portrays life. It is an artifice, an artifact of the real thing. Yet there are numerous examples of life imitating art that show this relationship is more complicated than we commonly suppose.



Documented examples of art predating actuality are best shown by using novels, as the characters and events in film and television are more nebulous and open to interpretation. The Titanic hitting an iceberg is fairly established as common knowledge but how many are aware of Morgan Robertson's 1898 novel called Futility? It predates the sinking of the Titanic by fourteen years and is about a great ship named the Titan hitting an iceberg. Thought to be unsinkable, it also carried 3000 people and displaced a similar tonnage. The novel wasn't widely known and only became noticed in retrospect, so it can't be claimed to have fostered a self-fulfilling prophecy. Irony I've found is a reliable indicator of memetic phenomena. Alas, irony is ever usually apparent only in retrospect. Though by making ourselves aware of potential irony and being alert for it, we could potentially circumvent some tragic ironies.



I'm exploring theory so I don't just want this to become a catalogue of incredible coincidences but noted thinkers such as Jung have tried to get a handle on such phenomena. Others like Charles Fort spent a lifetime cataloguing such oddities.



Another example could be Edgar Allen Poe's novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym , in which three shipwrecked sailors killed a cabin boy with the intention of eating him. In the novel, the sailors were rescued after the murder but before the cannibalism. Fifty years later this scenario was fulfilled with the three shipwrecked sailors killing the cabin boy with the difference being that they did indeed eat him before being rescued. However in both the novel and in real life, the cabin boy's name of Richard Parker were exactly the same.



When a film or TV show or even a novel has a certain character that achieves a populist niche and then similar traits show up in someone, we make a link. So we might say someone was a Freddy style killer or an Indiana Jones type of adventurer. There has long been a censorship lobby that claim violent acts are mimicked but proof is ever elusive, yet we acknowledge the need for role models. Without taking sides on this debate, it does seem that the creation of a fictional reality can have a factional correspondence. The beauty of memetics of course is that it allows for the correspondence to not have a direct link. So it is that a peculiar type of killer with a distinctive trademark is not even aware of a fictional precursor. Victims of such crimes often look in vain for a link that proves a criminal was inspired by a fictional representation or portrait.



Life imitating art doesn't just happen on a dramatic violent level. It can happen that a prescient author foretells a wonderful invention or social development. It can be coincidental in a neutral sense such as when a crossword compiler started using all the code-words for the D-day landings such as "Pluto" or "mulberry" in his puzzles. Despite being vigorously investigated for giving away information in a covert way, it was apparently a coincidence.



Films as a rule have happenstance meetings but tend to stay away from anything too overtly coincidental as it seems too ‘pat' a plot twist. It is belittling to the viewer to have simple coincidences as pushing the plot along as they seem overly convenient, and they also negate the drama of human action and will. The film Magnolia started with a dramatization of some incredible coincidences as a way to set-up the haphazard events of our lives but unfortunately couldn't deliver a coherent storyline.



The travel series "Diceman" has a man choosing destinations and activities by a roll of the dice. I'm interested because of any seemingly random event and travel in general, but the lack of any urgency or real purpose in the travel detracts somewhat from the drama of entertainment.



Does a fictional foretelling of something somehow create the future? Well yes but not in every case obviously though it probably sets up the potential to be actualized. A good example here could be the movie ‘Jaws'. I forget which small town was used as the location for the movie but shortly after filming the town recorded it's first ever shark attack. Is this an example of a meme growing to the point of becoming a reality? I prefer to think it is all correspondence but I couldn't say either way. Surely understanding is more important than having an accurate model?



Events happen in life. Those with literary antecedents can seem to have been miraculously fulfilled, and indeed the action of memes is a kind of miracle. Even proverbial or semi-miraculous events from the Bible have been documented in modern times. The biblical story of Jonah about him being carried in the belly of a whale can seem somewhat fanciful but it does have a modern day counterpart. In 1891, a man called James Bartley fell overboard from a ship called "A Star of the East" just off the Falklands. Now I'm not sure if this was a whaling ship, but James ended up being swallowed by a whale. The next day this whale was caught by a whaler and upon being cut open, James was found inside. He was apparently a gibbering idiot for several days after this experience.



Whether the foreshadowing of the future is an example of people who are supernaturally attuned is only part of the equation. These echoes are often remarkably trivial and only in retrospect do they then appear prescient or ironic. Memes give at least a toolkit that can provide fuller explanation. Another example of such a fictional work with a future echo would be the 1951 film The Tall Target which featured a New York detective trying to prevent an assassination of a president-elect. The detective's name was John Kennedy. It wasn't an acclaimed or famous movie, but is illustrative of how echoes of the future sound in areas we overlook and consider insignificant.



Twins



Twins are the best example to look at the interplay of memes and genes. Especially interesting are the identical twins that have been separated at birth. Thomas Bouchard from the University of Minnesota started a study in 1979 that has looked at 60 pairs of such twins. He found similarities estimated at 80% between such pairs though he discounted some personal quirks as being too individual and couldn't extrapolate them into the wider group.



The very first set of twins he did tests with (psychological profile tests) were James Springer and Edward Levis. They had been separately adopted at one month of age and had not been reunited until they were 39. There were some staggering coincidences such as they had both married and divorced a woman by the name of Linda and had each remarried to a woman called Betty. There's a slightly different account here from the Reader's Digest: The stories of identical twins' nearly identical lives are often astonishing, but perhaps none more so than those of identical twins born in Ohio. The twin boys were separated at birth, being adopted by different families. Unknown to each other, both families named the boys James. And here the coincidences just begin. Both James grew up not even knowing of the other, yet both sought law-enforcement training, both had abilities in mechanical drawing and carpentry, and each had married women named Linda. They both had sons whom one named James Alan and the other named James Allan. The twin brothers also divorced their wives and married other women - both named Betty. And they both owned dogs which they named Toy. Forty years after their childhood separation, the two men were reunited to share their amazingly similar lives. (Reader's Digest, January, 1980) A pair of twins that exemplified different cultural upbringing had been born in Trinidad and were separated at age six months. One went to a catholic family in Germany and as this was during the war, joined the Hitler youth. This was Oscar Stohr. His brother (Jack) was raised in a Jewish family in the Caribbean and had also spent some time in Israel. They weren't reunited until their 50's and both had similar gaits, similar speech patterns and ways of thinking. Both liked spicy food and both had the same quirks such as flushing the toilet before using it.



Here's one more twin coincidence.



John and Arthur Mowforth were twins who lived about 80 miles apart in Great Britain. On the evening of May 22, 1975, both fell severely ill from chest pains. The families of both men were completely unaware of the other's illness. Both men were rushed to separate hospitals at approximately the same time. And both died of heart attacks shortly after arrival. ( Chronogenetics: The Inheritance of Biological Time , Luigi Gedda and Gianni Brenci)



The above example is from the paranormal.about.com website. The news services such as Reuters have regular stories about incredible coincidences concerning twins such as the one below. Now obviously twins are not carbon copies of each other and there are attributes that differ. But so many of them do have lives that run on parallel tracks, that if one twin does something there's a sense of inevitability that the other twin will do something similar just like waiting for the other shoe to drop.



Finnish twin brothers, aged 71, were killed in identical bicycle accidents along the same road two hours apart, police said. "This is simply a historic coincidence. Although the road is a busy one, accidents don't occur every day," police officer Marja-Leena Huhtala told Reuters. "It made my hair stand on end when I heard the two were brothers, and identical twins at that. It came to mind that perhaps someone from upstairs had a say in this," she said. The reason identical twins can often break their arm or get married on the same days despite no physical contact is memetics. My theory and contention is that because they share the same meme, they are susceptible to the same memetic template. Now it is possible that they develop divergent lives through experience and conscious effort and thereby a meme that differs from their twin, but when they unconsciously are hooked up to it as a cloned animal would be, then their lives run on parallel tracks.



Magic, Mystics and Memes



Would be devolvers of memes that don't really understand how they work are laying themselves open to be used by an amoral force. I'm thinking of occultists that use ceremonies and other inducements as a way to devolve power and affect the universe. Like the energy attributed to a poltergeist, these memetic energies aren't readily controllable and attempts to do so can result in the demise of the attempter. The inherent contradictions of a meme will disrupt any attempted containment.



Having had some experience of meetings of occultists for my own curious quest for knowledge, I was struck by the disproportionate share of cripples and generally unhealthy appearances at such gatherings. I can only assume that those that chant or wave wands to attract a river of universal energy are merely inviting in a dissipation of their own. Now I do think you can focus this river of universal energy and you can use memes to power your activities but this inculcation is subtle and diffuse.



A practical aspect of advanced memetics is divination. The memetic ripples that percolate through our universe are readable to the adept. Astrology operates not by the commonly supposed causal connection but is supposed to indicate a correspondence. Memetics can operate a corresponding system that involves looking for potential ironies. Linguistic irony and fictional foreshadowing are all tools for a memetic prophet. Random and trivial events are all grist for the mill with which to grind out a prognosis and read the signs. The more random and the more startling the coincidence are all evidentiary phenomena with which to build a pattern.



Most people that dabble in magic don't really understand how the universe works and so make bad magicians. Like praying, magic is best not done for some personal immediate gain or to yearn for a result too consciously. Some adepts have incorporated this absent of lust for result approach.



Ritual and ceremony usually drains the performer(s) and empowers some unwitting other as often as not and explains why shamanistic societies aren't very successful. These shamans don't attract the larger benefits because they barely have an inkling of the sideways glance, the soft focus. In the same way that children can grow to embody a parent's wishes, a result is often delayed to the point at which it has been forgotten about. In this way, we are all minor memetic magicians. Our memetic desires are often fulfilled and embodied by our children, such as my own son having fast cars at an age when I would have wanted them myself.



Our lusts can also morph out from the meme to the physical. It seems to me that women are getting progressively more beautiful down the decades, but that's amenable to