The Genesis of this volume can be traced back some eighteen years to my reading of an article by V.  R.  Potter (1964) in Science, in which he discussed briefly the notion that ideas are the cultural analogue of DNA, that is, that ideas are the source of cultural information as well as the basic units of cultural evolution.  I had, by that time, begun to put together lecture material which eventually was published as The Natural History of Man (Swanson 1973).  Potter's point of view continues to intrigue me, and although I had dealt with the problem only briefly and rather casually, I coined the term sociogene to identify those ideas that, maturing into shared concepts and interacting with the expressed information encoded in DNA, led to the emergence of the human phenotype with which we are all familiar.  I still find the term appropriate. 

              Swanson [1983, 1]

             A Sociogene is defined as a mental concept, a structured image, arising from one or more acts of experience, molded into shape and integrated with other sociogenes by the action of the central nervous system and from which information is extracted, expressible, and transmissible within the context of the social milieu.  Unlike biogenes, sociogenes do not have a detectable molecular structure; they are mental abstractions and they are, therefore, that much more difficult to define and characterize. 

               Swanson [1983,90]

            I think a new type of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet.  It is staring us in the face.  It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate which leaves the old gene panting far behind. 

               The new soup is the soup of human culture.  We need a name for this new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.  'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'.  I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.  If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même.  It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'. 

               Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making or of building arches.  Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brian via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. 

             Richard Dawkins [1976, 206].

Swanson [1983, 90‑92] compares the related terms culturgen, mentifact, sociofact, mnemotype, mnemonikos, and mneme from several different writers. 

            More recently, Dawkins (1976) has added still another term with a somewhat different meaning.  In the context of his "selfish gene" hypothesis in which the organism is subservient to the gene as the replicator, he has sought a term that would represent the replicator of cultural evolution.  There meme, an abbreviation of mimene (from the Greek mimèsis, imitation) was coined to serve as "a unit of cultural, or a unit of imitation" (italics his).  As with Lumsden and Wilson's culturgen, Dawkins' term is another cultural catchall: in his words "memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.  Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which in the broad sense, can be called imitation." If one can assume that Dawkins means that it is ideas or concepts that leap from "brain to brain," then the meme and the sociogene are not too far different from each other in meaning.

                [Swanson, 1983, 92]

The concept of a unit of evolutionary replicator for culture has undergone its own evolution under the mutational effect of such individuals as Alexander [1974], Cavalli-Sforza [1971], Cloak [1975], and Lumsden [1981], and further into a general theory of evolution by such individuals as Bonner [1988] and Csanyi [1982].  An excellent exposition on the potential of the meme concept and examples of meme complexes is found in Hofstadter [1985]. 

Memes are purported to form an evolutionary system because

1.       they replicate as they are transmitted from individual to individual,

2.       they mutate because the copying is not perfect, and

3.       they are selected by the individuals who carry them for the perceived value they provide to meet that individual’s wants.

I shall analyze this first from a population dynamics point of view and then with the Kaufmann NK evolutionary model which translates the above three components into a more precise mathematical model.

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