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:''This article is related to the study of self-replicating units of culture, not to be confused with Mimesis.'' Memetics is a theory of mental content based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution, originating from the popularization of Richard Dawkins' 1976 book ''The Selfish Gene.''〔 〕 Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. The meme, analogous to a gene, was conceived as a "unit of culture" (an idea, belief, pattern of behaviour, etc.) which is "hosted" in the minds of one or more individuals, and which can reproduce itself, thereby jumping from mind to mind. Thus what would otherwise be regarded as one individual influencing another to adopt a belief is seen as an idea-replicator reproducing itself in a new host. As with genetics, particularly under a Dawkinsian interpretation, a meme's success may be due to its contribution to the effectiveness of its host. Memetics is also notable for sidestepping the traditional concern with the ''truth'' of ideas and beliefs. Instead, it is interested in their success.〔Kantorovich, Aharon (2013) (An Evolutionary View of Science: Imitation and Memetics. )〕 The Usenet newsgroup alt.memetics started in 1993 with peak posting years in the mid to late 1990s. The ''Journal of Memetics'' was published electronically from 1997 to 2005.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Index to all JoM-EMIT Issues )〕 ==History== In his book ''The Selfish Gene'' (1976), the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins used the term ''meme'' to describe a unit of human cultural transmission analogous to the gene, arguing that replication also happens in culture, albeit in a different sense. Ted Cloak had briefly outlined a similar hypothesis in 1975, which Dawkins referenced. Cultural evolution itself is a much older topic, with a history that dates back to Darwin's era. Dawkins (1976) contended that the meme is a unit of information residing in the brain and is the mutating replicator in human cultural evolution. It is a pattern that can influence its surroundings – that is, it has causal agency – and can propagate. This created great debate among sociologists, biologists, and scientists of other disciplines, because Dawkins himself did not provide a sufficient explanation of how the replication of units of information in the brain controls human behaviour and ultimately culture, since the principal topic of the book was genetics. Dawkins apparently did not intend to present a comprehensive theory of ''memetics'' in ''The Selfish Gene'', but rather coined the term ''meme'' in a speculative spirit. Accordingly, the term "unit of information" came to be defined in different ways by many scientists. The modern memetics movement dates from the mid-1980s. A January 1983 Metamagical Themas column by Douglas Hofstadter, in ''Scientific American'', was influential as was his 1985 book of the same name. "Memeticist" was coined as analogous to "geneticist" originally in ''The Selfish Gene.'' Later Arel Lucas suggested that the discipline that studies memes and their connections to human and other carriers of them be known as memetics by analogy with 'genetics.'" Dawkins' ''The Selfish Gene'' has been a factor in drawing in people of disparate intellectual backgrounds. Another stimulus was the publication in 1991 of ''Consciousness Explained'' by Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett, which incorporated the meme concept into a theory of the mind. In his 1991 essay "Viruses of the Mind", Richard Dawkins used memetics to explain the phenomenon of religious belief and the various characteristics of organised religions. By then, memetics had also become a theme appearing in fiction (e.g. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash). The idea of ''language as a virus'' had already been introduced by William S. Burroughs as early as 1962 in his book ''The Ticket That Exploded'', and later in ''The Electronic Revolution'', published in 1970 in ''The Job'' and is also explored in (Media Virus ) by Douglas Rushkoff in 1995. However, the foundation of memetics in full modern incarnation originates in the publication in 1996 of two books by authors outside the academic mainstream: ''Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme'' by former Microsoft executive turned motivational speaker and professional poker player, Richard Brodie, and ''Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society'' by Aaron Lynch, a mathematician and philosopher who worked for many years as an engineer at Fermilab. Lynch claimed to have conceived his theory totally independently of any contact with academics in the cultural evolutionary sphere, and apparently was not even aware of Dawkins' ''The Selfish Gene'' until his book was very close to publication. Around the same time as the publication of the books by Lynch and Brodie the e-journal (Journal of Memetics – ''Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission'' ) appeared on the web. It was first hosted by the Centre for Policy Modelling at Manchester Metropolitan University but later taken over by Francis Heylighen of the CLEA research institute at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The e-journal soon became the central point for publication and debate within the nascent memeticist community. (There had been a short-lived paper memetics publication starting in 1990, the ''Journal of Ideas'' edited by Elan Moritz.〔(The Journal of Ideas, ISSN 1049-6335, Contents Online )〕) In 1999, Susan Blackmore, a psychologist at the University of the West of England, published ''The Meme Machine'', which more fully worked out the ideas of Dennett, Lynch, and Brodie and attempted to compare and contrast them with various approaches from the cultural evolutionary mainstream, as well as providing novel, and controversial, memetics-based theories for the evolution of language and the human sense of individual selfhood. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Memetics」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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