The Concept of the Modern Meme of a culture - often with the aim of conveying a particular phenomenon, theme or meaning represented by the "meme". A “meme” serves as a unit to carry ideas, symbols, or cultural practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with an imitated theme. Proponents of the concept view “memes” as cultural analogues of genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. Proponents theorize that “memes” are a viral phenomenon that could evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to biological evolution. “Memes” do this through processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, each of which influences the reproductive success of “memes.” “Memes” spread through the behavior they generate in their hosts. “Memes” that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread and mutate. “Memes” that replicate more effectively become more successful, and some can replicate effectively even when they prove detrimental to the well-being of their host. A field of study called memetics arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Criticisms from several fronts have challenged the idea that academic study can empirically examine memes. However, developments in neuroimaging may make empirical study possible. Some commentators in the social sciences question the idea that one can meaningfully classify culture in terms of discrete units and are particularly critical of the biological nature of the theory's foundations. Others have argued that this use of the term is the result of a misunderstanding of the original proposal. The word “meme” is a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins. It originated from Dawkins' 1976 book “The Selfish Gene.” Dawkins' position is somewhat ambiguous: he welcomed N. K. Humphrey's suggestion that "memes" should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically, and proposed considering memes as "physically residing in the brain". before endorsing Humphrey's opinion, it had been simpler. At the 2013 New Director's Showcase in Cannes, Dawkins' take on memetics was deliberately ambiguous. Etymology The word meme is an abbreviation of mime coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in “The Selfish Gene”. " as a concept for discussing evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, slogans, fashion, and the technology of string making. Kenneth Pike coined the related terms emic and etic. generalizing the linguistic idea of phoneme, morpheme, grapheme, lexeme, and tagmeme, characterizing them as an internal view and external view of behavior and extending the concept into a tagmemic theory of human behavior Origins The word "meme" originated in Richard Dawkins' book of 1976 "The Selfish Gene". Dawkins cites the work of geneticist LL Cavalli-Sforza, anthropologist FT Cloak, and ethologist JM Cullen as inspiration. Dawkins wrote that evolution did not depend on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a unityof self-replicating transmission: in the case of biological evolution, the gene. For Dawkins, the meme exemplified another self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution. Although Dawkins invented the term "meme" and developed meme theory, the possibility that ideas were subject to the same evolutionary pressures as biological attributes was discussed in Darwin's time. TH Huxley stated that “The struggle for existence is as true in the intellectual world as in the physical. A theory is a kind of thought, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power to resist extinction by its rivals.'Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator. He hypothesized that many cultural entities could be considered 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 can refine, combine, or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time. Dawkins compared the process by which memes survive and change through the evolution of culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution. On the contrary, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. The transmission of “memes” requires a physical medium, such as photons, sound waves, touch, taste or smell because “memes” can only be transmitted through the senses. Dawkins observed that in a cultured society a person does not need to have descendants to remain influential in the actions of individuals thousands of years after their death. But if you contribute to world culture, if you have a good idea... it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved into the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a genius or two alive in today's world, as GC Williams observed, but who cares? The “meme” complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still strong. Although Dawkins invented the term meme, he did not claim that the idea was entirely new, and other expressions have been used for similar ideas in the past. In 1904, Richard Semon published “Die Meme”. The term “meme” was also used in Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the White Ant, with some parallels to Dawkins' concept. Reusing the neural space that hosts the copy of a certain “meme” to host different memes is the biggest threat to the copy of that “meme”. A “meme” that increases the longevity of its hosts will generally survive longer. Conversely, a meme that shortens the longevity of its hosts will tend to disappear more quickly. However, because hosts are mortal, retention is not sufficient to perpetuate a meme in the long term; even memes need transmission. Life forms can transmit information both vertically and horizontally. “Memes” can replicate vertically or horizontally within a single biological generation. They can also remain dormant for long periods of time. “Memes” reproduce themselves by copying from one nervous system to another, both by communication and imitation. Imitation often involves copying an observed behavior of another individual. Communication can be direct or indirect, where “memes” are transmitted from one individual to another through a recorded copy in an inanimate source, such as a book or a musical score. Adam McNamara has suggested that memes can therefore be classified as internal or external.“meme” Social contagions such as fads, hysteria, imitative crime, and imitative suicide exemplify “memes” seen as the contagious imitation of ideas. Observers distinguish the contagious imitation of “memes” from instinctively contagious phenomena such as yawning and laughing, which they consider innate behaviors. Aaron Lynch has described seven general patterns of “meme” transmission, or “thought contagion”:- Quantity of parenting: an idea that influences the number of children one has. Children respond particularly receptively to their parents' ideas, and so ideas that, directly or indirectly, encourage a higher birth rate will be replicated at a higher rate than those of their parents. Those who discourage higher birth rates high. - Efficiency of parenting: an idea that increases the percentage of children who will adopt their parents' ideas. Cultural separatism exemplifies a practice in which a higher rate of replication of the “meme” can be expected, because the “meme” for separation creates a barrier from exposure to competing ideas. - Proselytic: ideas generally passed on to others besides one's children. Ideas that encourage the proselytization of a “meme,” as seen in many religious or political movements, can replicate “memes” horizontally across a given generation, spreading more rapidly than parent-to-child “meme” transmissions. ideas that influence those who hold them to continue to hold on to them for a long time. Ideas that encourage longevity in their hosts, or that leave hosts particularly resistant to abandoning or replacing these ideas, improve the shelf-life of "memes" and offer protection from competition or proselytization by other "memes." - Adversative: ideas that influence those who host them. hold them back to attack or sabotage competing ideas and/or those who support them. Adversative replication can give an advantage in the transmission of the “meme” when the “meme” itself encourages aggression against other “memes”. - Cognitive: ideas perceived as convincing by the majority of the population who encounters them. Cognitively transmitted “memes” are highly dependent on a set of other ideas and cognitive traits already widely spread in the population, and therefore usually spread more passively than other forms of “meme” transmission. “Memes” spread in cognitive transmission do not count as self-replicating.- Motivational: ideas that people adopt because they perceive a certain personal interest in adopting them. Strictly speaking, motivationally transmitted “memes” are not self-propagating, but this mode of transmission often occurs in association with self-replicating memes in the parental, proselytizing, and conservative modes. “Memes” as Discrete Units Dawkins initially defined meme as a noun that “conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” The "meme" as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless of whether that thought contains others within it or is part of a larger meme. A “meme” might consist of a single word, or a “meme” might consist of the entire speech in which that word first appeared. This constitutes an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single self-replicating unit of information found on the self-replicating chromosome. While the identification of "memes" as "units" conveys their nature of replicating as discrete and indivisible entities, it does not imply that thoughts are somehow quantized or that "atomic" ideas exist that cannot be dissected into smaller pieces . A “meme” does not have a certain size. SusanBlackmore writes that the melodies of Beethoven's symphonies are commonly used to illustrate the difficulty inherent in delimiting memes as discrete units. She notes that while the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony form a “meme” that is widely replicated as an independent unit, the entire symphony can also be considered a single “meme.” Evolutionary Influences on Memes Dawkins noted the three conditions that must exist for evolution to occur: - variation, or the introduction of new changes into existing elements; - inheritance or replication, or the ability to make copies of elements; - "fitness "differential, or the opportunity for one element to be more or less suited to the environment than another. Dawkins points out that the process of evolution occurs naturally whenever these conditions coexist, and that evolution does not only apply to organic elements such as genes. He believes that “memes” also have the properties necessary for evolution, and therefore sees the evolution of “memes” not simply as analogous to genetic evolution, but as a real phenomenon subject to the laws of natural selection. Dawkins noted that as various ideas pass from one generation to the next, they can benefit or detract from the survival of the people who get those ideas, or affect the survival of the ideas themselves. For example, a given culture may develop unique designs and methods of tool production that give it a competitive advantage over another culture. Each tool design therefore acts in a certain sense similar to a biological gene in the sense that some populations possess it and others do not, and the function of the “meme” directly influences the presence of the design in future generations. In line with the thesis that in evolution one can view organisms simply as suitable "hosts" for reproducing genes, Dawkins argues that one can view people as "hosts" for replicating memes. As a result, a successful "meme" may or may not need to provide any benefit to its host. Susan Blackmore distinguishes the difference between the two modes of inheritance in the evolution of "memes", characterizing the Darwinian mode as "instruction copying" and the Lamarckian as "product copying". Theistic memes discussed include the "prohibition of aberrant sexual practices such as incest, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, castration, and religious prostitution", which may have increased the vertical transmission of the parent religious memeplex. Similar “memes” are therefore included in most religious memeplexes and harden over time; they become an "inviolable canon" or a set of dogmas, and then find a place in secular law. This could also be defined as the propagation of a taboo. Memetics The discipline of memetics, which dates back to the mid-1980s, provides an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of “meme.” Memetics have proposed that, just as memes work analogously to genes, memetics work analogously to genetics. Memetics attempts to apply conventional scientific methods to explain existing patterns and the transmission of cultural ideas. Major criticisms of memetics include the claim that memetics ignores established advances in other fields of cultural study, such as sociology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, and social psychology. Questions remain as to whether or not the meme concept counts as a validly refutable scientific theory. This view regards memetics as a theory in its infancy: a protoscience for proponents, or a pseudoscience for some detractors. Criticism of meme theory An objection to the study of the evolution of memesin genetic terms it involves a perceived gap in the gene/meme analogy: the cumulative evolution of genes depends on biological selective pressures that are neither too large nor too small in relation to mutation rates. There seems to be no reason to think that the same balance will exist in selection pressures on “memes.” Luis Benitez-Bribiesca MD, a critic of memetics, calls the theory a "pseudoscientific dogma" and "a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of consciousness and cultural evolution." As a factual criticism, Benitez-Bribiesca points to the lack of a "code script" for "memes" and the excessive instability of the "meme" mutation mechanism, which would lead to low replication precision and a high mutation rate , making the evolutionary process chaotic. British political philosopher John Gray characterized Dawkins's memetic theory of religion as "nonsense" and "not even a theory... the latest in a series of ill-advised Darwinian metaphors", comparable to Intelligent Design in its value as science. Another criticism comes from semiotic theorists such as Deacon and Kull. This view considers the concept of "meme" as a primitivized concept of "sign". The “meme” is therefore described in memetics as a sign without a triadic nature. Semiotics may consider a “meme” to be a “degenerate” sign, encompassing only its ability to be copied. Consequently, in the broadest sense, the objects of copying are memes, while the objects of translation and interpretation are signs. Fracchia and Lewontin consider memetics reductionist and inadequate. Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr disapproved of Dawkins' genetic view and use of the term "meme", stating that it was an "unnecessary synonym" of "concept", reasoning that concepts are not limited to an individual or a generation, they can persist for long periods of time and can evolve. ApplicationsOpinions differ on how best to apply the meme concept within an "appropriate" disciplinary framework. One view holds that memes provide a useful philosophical perspective with which to examine cultural evolution. Proponents of this view argue that considering cultural developments from the perspective of “memes” – as if “memes” themselves respond to pressure to maximize their own replication and survival – can lead to useful insights and produce valuable predictions about how culture develops over time. Others, such as Bruce Edmonds and Robert Aunger, have focused on the need to provide an empirical basis for memetics to become a useful and respected scientific discipline. A third approach, described by Joseph Poulshock, as "radical memetics" seeks to place memes at the center of a materialist theory of mind and personal identity. Prominent researchers in evolutionary psychology and anthropology, including Scott Atran, Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer, John Tooby and others, argue for the possibility of incompatibility between modularity of the mind and memetics. In their view, minds structure some communicable aspects of the ideas produced, and these communicable aspects generally trigger or elicit ideas in other minds through inference and not high-fidelity replication or imitation. Atran discusses communication involving religious beliefs as a case in point. In a series of experiments he asked religious people to write the meaning of the Ten Commandments on a piece of paper. Despite subjects' expectations of consensus, interpretations of the commandments showed wide ranges of variation, with little evidence of consensus. In another experiment, subjects with autism and subjects without autism interpreted ideological and religious sayings. People with autism have shown a trend

Topic > The Concept of the Modern Meme of a culture - often with the aim of conveying a particular phenomenon, theme or meaning represented by the "meme". A “meme” serves as a unit to carry ideas, symbols, or cultural practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with an imitated theme. Proponents of the concept view “memes” as cultural analogues of genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. Proponents theorize that “memes” are a viral phenomenon that could evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to biological evolution. “Memes” do this through processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, each of which influences the reproductive success of “memes.” “Memes” spread through the behavior they generate in their hosts. “Memes” that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread and mutate. “Memes” that replicate more effectively become more successful, and some can replicate effectively even when they prove detrimental to the well-being of their host. A field of study called memetics arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Criticisms from several fronts have challenged the idea that academic study can empirically examine memes. However, developments in neuroimaging may make empirical study possible. Some commentators in the social sciences question the idea that one can meaningfully classify culture in terms of discrete units and are particularly critical of the biological nature of the theory's foundations. Others have argued that this use of the term is the result of a misunderstanding of the original proposal. The word “meme” is a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins. It originated from Dawkins' 1976 book “The Selfish Gene.” Dawkins' position is somewhat ambiguous: he welcomed N. K. Humphrey's suggestion that "memes" should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically, and proposed considering memes as "physically residing in the brain". before endorsing Humphrey's opinion, it had been simpler. At the 2013 New Director's Showcase in Cannes, Dawkins' take on memetics was deliberately ambiguous. Etymology The word meme is an abbreviation of mime coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in “The Selfish Gene”. " as a concept for discussing evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, slogans, fashion, and the technology of string making. Kenneth Pike coined the related terms emic and etic. generalizing the linguistic idea of phoneme, morpheme, grapheme, lexeme, and tagmeme, characterizing them as an internal view and external view of behavior and extending the concept into a tagmemic theory of human behavior Origins The word "meme" originated in Richard Dawkins' book of 1976 "The Selfish Gene". Dawkins cites the work of geneticist LL Cavalli-Sforza, anthropologist FT Cloak, and ethologist JM Cullen as inspiration. Dawkins wrote that evolution did not depend on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a unityof self-replicating transmission: in the case of biological evolution, the gene. For Dawkins, the meme exemplified another self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution. Although Dawkins invented the term "meme" and developed meme theory, the possibility that ideas were subject to the same evolutionary pressures as biological attributes was discussed in Darwin's time. TH Huxley stated that “The struggle for existence is as true in the intellectual world as in the physical. A theory is a kind of thought, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power to resist extinction by its rivals.'Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator. He hypothesized that many cultural entities could be considered 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 can refine, combine, or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time. Dawkins compared the process by which memes survive and change through the evolution of culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution. On the contrary, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. The transmission of “memes” requires a physical medium, such as photons, sound waves, touch, taste or smell because “memes” can only be transmitted through the senses. Dawkins observed that in a cultured society a person does not need to have descendants to remain influential in the actions of individuals thousands of years after their death. But if you contribute to world culture, if you have a good idea... it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved into the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a genius or two alive in today's world, as GC Williams observed, but who cares? The “meme” complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still strong. Although Dawkins invented the term meme, he did not claim that the idea was entirely new, and other expressions have been used for similar ideas in the past. In 1904, Richard Semon published “Die Meme”. The term “meme” was also used in Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the White Ant, with some parallels to Dawkins' concept. Reusing the neural space that hosts the copy of a certain “meme” to host different memes is the biggest threat to the copy of that “meme”. A “meme” that increases the longevity of its hosts will generally survive longer. Conversely, a meme that shortens the longevity of its hosts will tend to disappear more quickly. However, because hosts are mortal, retention is not sufficient to perpetuate a meme in the long term; even memes need transmission. Life forms can transmit information both vertically and horizontally. “Memes” can replicate vertically or horizontally within a single biological generation. They can also remain dormant for long periods of time. “Memes” reproduce themselves by copying from one nervous system to another, both by communication and imitation. Imitation often involves copying an observed behavior of another individual. Communication can be direct or indirect, where “memes” are transmitted from one individual to another through a recorded copy in an inanimate source, such as a book or a musical score. Adam McNamara has suggested that memes can therefore be classified as internal or external.“meme” Social contagions such as fads, hysteria, imitative crime, and imitative suicide exemplify “memes” seen as the contagious imitation of ideas. Observers distinguish the contagious imitation of “memes” from instinctively contagious phenomena such as yawning and laughing, which they consider innate behaviors. Aaron Lynch has described seven general patterns of “meme” transmission, or “thought contagion”:- Quantity of parenting: an idea that influences the number of children one has. Children respond particularly receptively to their parents' ideas, and so ideas that, directly or indirectly, encourage a higher birth rate will be replicated at a higher rate than those of their parents. Those who discourage higher birth rates high. - Efficiency of parenting: an idea that increases the percentage of children who will adopt their parents' ideas. Cultural separatism exemplifies a practice in which a higher rate of replication of the “meme” can be expected, because the “meme” for separation creates a barrier from exposure to competing ideas. - Proselytic: ideas generally passed on to others besides one's children. Ideas that encourage the proselytization of a “meme,” as seen in many religious or political movements, can replicate “memes” horizontally across a given generation, spreading more rapidly than parent-to-child “meme” transmissions. ideas that influence those who hold them to continue to hold on to them for a long time. Ideas that encourage longevity in their hosts, or that leave hosts particularly resistant to abandoning or replacing these ideas, improve the shelf-life of "memes" and offer protection from competition or proselytization by other "memes." - Adversative: ideas that influence those who host them. hold them back to attack or sabotage competing ideas and/or those who support them. Adversative replication can give an advantage in the transmission of the “meme” when the “meme” itself encourages aggression against other “memes”. - Cognitive: ideas perceived as convincing by the majority of the population who encounters them. Cognitively transmitted “memes” are highly dependent on a set of other ideas and cognitive traits already widely spread in the population, and therefore usually spread more passively than other forms of “meme” transmission. “Memes” spread in cognitive transmission do not count as self-replicating.- Motivational: ideas that people adopt because they perceive a certain personal interest in adopting them. Strictly speaking, motivationally transmitted “memes” are not self-propagating, but this mode of transmission often occurs in association with self-replicating memes in the parental, proselytizing, and conservative modes. “Memes” as Discrete Units Dawkins initially defined meme as a noun that “conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” The "meme" as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless of whether that thought contains others within it or is part of a larger meme. A “meme” might consist of a single word, or a “meme” might consist of the entire speech in which that word first appeared. This constitutes an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single self-replicating unit of information found on the self-replicating chromosome. While the identification of "memes" as "units" conveys their nature of replicating as discrete and indivisible entities, it does not imply that thoughts are somehow quantized or that "atomic" ideas exist that cannot be dissected into smaller pieces . A “meme” does not have a certain size. SusanBlackmore writes that the melodies of Beethoven's symphonies are commonly used to illustrate the difficulty inherent in delimiting memes as discrete units. She notes that while the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony form a “meme” that is widely replicated as an independent unit, the entire symphony can also be considered a single “meme.” Evolutionary Influences on Memes Dawkins noted the three conditions that must exist for evolution to occur: - variation, or the introduction of new changes into existing elements; - inheritance or replication, or the ability to make copies of elements; - "fitness "differential, or the opportunity for one element to be more or less suited to the environment than another. Dawkins points out that the process of evolution occurs naturally whenever these conditions coexist, and that evolution does not only apply to organic elements such as genes. He believes that “memes” also have the properties necessary for evolution, and therefore sees the evolution of “memes” not simply as analogous to genetic evolution, but as a real phenomenon subject to the laws of natural selection. Dawkins noted that as various ideas pass from one generation to the next, they can benefit or detract from the survival of the people who get those ideas, or affect the survival of the ideas themselves. For example, a given culture may develop unique designs and methods of tool production that give it a competitive advantage over another culture. Each tool design therefore acts in a certain sense similar to a biological gene in the sense that some populations possess it and others do not, and the function of the “meme” directly influences the presence of the design in future generations. In line with the thesis that in evolution one can view organisms simply as suitable "hosts" for reproducing genes, Dawkins argues that one can view people as "hosts" for replicating memes. As a result, a successful "meme" may or may not need to provide any benefit to its host. Susan Blackmore distinguishes the difference between the two modes of inheritance in the evolution of "memes", characterizing the Darwinian mode as "instruction copying" and the Lamarckian as "product copying". Theistic memes discussed include the "prohibition of aberrant sexual practices such as incest, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, castration, and religious prostitution", which may have increased the vertical transmission of the parent religious memeplex. Similar “memes” are therefore included in most religious memeplexes and harden over time; they become an "inviolable canon" or a set of dogmas, and then find a place in secular law. This could also be defined as the propagation of a taboo. Memetics The discipline of memetics, which dates back to the mid-1980s, provides an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of “meme.” Memetics have proposed that, just as memes work analogously to genes, memetics work analogously to genetics. Memetics attempts to apply conventional scientific methods to explain existing patterns and the transmission of cultural ideas. Major criticisms of memetics include the claim that memetics ignores established advances in other fields of cultural study, such as sociology, cultural anthropology, cognitive psychology, and social psychology. Questions remain as to whether or not the meme concept counts as a validly refutable scientific theory. This view regards memetics as a theory in its infancy: a protoscience for proponents, or a pseudoscience for some detractors. Criticism of meme theory An objection to the study of the evolution of memesin genetic terms it involves a perceived gap in the gene/meme analogy: the cumulative evolution of genes depends on biological selective pressures that are neither too large nor too small in relation to mutation rates. There seems to be no reason to think that the same balance will exist in selection pressures on “memes.” Luis Benitez-Bribiesca MD, a critic of memetics, calls the theory a "pseudoscientific dogma" and "a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of consciousness and cultural evolution." As a factual criticism, Benitez-Bribiesca points to the lack of a "code script" for "memes" and the excessive instability of the "meme" mutation mechanism, which would lead to low replication precision and a high mutation rate , making the evolutionary process chaotic. British political philosopher John Gray characterized Dawkins's memetic theory of religion as "nonsense" and "not even a theory... the latest in a series of ill-advised Darwinian metaphors", comparable to Intelligent Design in its value as science. Another criticism comes from semiotic theorists such as Deacon and Kull. This view considers the concept of "meme" as a primitivized concept of "sign". The “meme” is therefore described in memetics as a sign without a triadic nature. Semiotics may consider a “meme” to be a “degenerate” sign, encompassing only its ability to be copied. Consequently, in the broadest sense, the objects of copying are memes, while the objects of translation and interpretation are signs. Fracchia and Lewontin consider memetics reductionist and inadequate. Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr disapproved of Dawkins' genetic view and use of the term "meme", stating that it was an "unnecessary synonym" of "concept", reasoning that concepts are not limited to an individual or a generation, they can persist for long periods of time and can evolve. ApplicationsOpinions differ on how best to apply the meme concept within an "appropriate" disciplinary framework. One view holds that memes provide a useful philosophical perspective with which to examine cultural evolution. Proponents of this view argue that considering cultural developments from the perspective of “memes” – as if “memes” themselves respond to pressure to maximize their own replication and survival – can lead to useful insights and produce valuable predictions about how culture develops over time. Others, such as Bruce Edmonds and Robert Aunger, have focused on the need to provide an empirical basis for memetics to become a useful and respected scientific discipline. A third approach, described by Joseph Poulshock, as "radical memetics" seeks to place memes at the center of a materialist theory of mind and personal identity. Prominent researchers in evolutionary psychology and anthropology, including Scott Atran, Dan Sperber, Pascal Boyer, John Tooby and others, argue for the possibility of incompatibility between modularity of the mind and memetics. In their view, minds structure some communicable aspects of the ideas produced, and these communicable aspects generally trigger or elicit ideas in other minds through inference and not high-fidelity replication or imitation. Atran discusses communication involving religious beliefs as a case in point. In a series of experiments he asked religious people to write the meaning of the Ten Commandments on a piece of paper. Despite subjects' expectations of consensus, interpretations of the commandments showed wide ranges of variation, with little evidence of consensus. In another experiment, subjects with autism and subjects without autism interpreted ideological and religious sayings. People with autism have shown a trend