Abstract

Emerging from a gene-centred analogy of cultural evolution, memetics rose to prominence between the 1980s and early 2000s before entering a period of relative decline. It conceptualises culture as a dynamic system composed of memes and their complexes, which are mutually cooperating and competing units expressed in human behaviour and propagated by imitation. Memes compete for a faster transmission and wider representation within a population’s ‘meme pool’ either by benefiting their hosts or by spreading ‘selfishly’, even at the host’s expense—this mirrors the dynamics observed in evolutionary parasitology. This parallel demonstrates both the strengths and the limitations of memetics, which inherited the foundational assumptions of the ‘selfish gene’ model. The waning influence of memetics can be attributed to the criticism that has been levied against its reductionism, biologicism, limited theoretical novelty, its assumption of particulate inheritance, and its neglect of broader cultural and social contexts. Nevertheless, informed by population genetics and evolutionary-parasitological models, memetics remains effective in explaining various specific cultural phenomena, especially the propagation of ‘selfish’ deleterious or destabilising cultural traits, which spread despite harming their hosts. At the same time, approaches from the philosophy of technology, including postphenomenology, emphasise that cultural evolution does not take place in a neutral medium: there exist various sociotechnical systems which actively shape which memes proliferate and at times amplify the spread of harmful variants. An integrative perspective that would enrich memetic principles by postphenomenological and even biosemiotic insights may thus provide the foundation of a renewed, ‘neo-memetic’ framework capable of addressing the dynamics of cultural evolution in an age of global digital interconnectivity.