Seite 3: Memes

When we talk about ideas that replicate in culture we are talking about memes, a concept that was advanced by Richard Dawkins and defined as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation" (1978, p. 206). Chris Langton defines a meme as "an idea, joke, poem or tune that spreads throughout a population by being copied again and again as people pass it on to their friends" (1992, p. xi). Erich Schultes (1992) created an interesting demonstration of a meme: a self-referential paragraph that entreats us to copy it and pass it on to others. Memes have even been treated fictionally in Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash", making that novel, like Schultes' paragraph, a meme about memes.

The landscape in which memes replicate, interact, adapt, and evolve Douglas Hofstadter calls the ideosphere, or collective cultural imagination (1985). (The "ideosphere" is to the "biosphere" what "memes" are to "genes.") Dawkins sees memes as competing for human attention, time, and memory (much the way Thomas Ray's AL creatures compete for computer memory in his Tierra program) as well as things like "radio and television time, billboard space, newspaper column-inches, and library shelf-space" (1978, p. 212). This "selfish meme" seems to reach into the physical world and employ it for its own ends. In Daniel Dennett's words, "A scholar is just a library's way of making another library" (1995, p. 346). That is, we are merely the unwitting host mechanism memes use to multiply themselves.

Thus in Dennett's view, an author (or reader) is a novel's way of getting itself copied. Preposterous as this view is, it does allow us to see a fictional work as something like Erich Schultes' paragraph, a particular arrangement of words that tries to get itself replicated by virtue of its intrinsic interest or merit. A successful fictional meme could be considered one that is still getting itself copied after x generations have passed since it was first circulated. It can also be observed, and often is, that the long term reproductive success of a piece of fiction correlates pretty well with quality.

We could indeed go on and talk about the fitness landscapes on which fictional memes compete and adapt; how certain innovations in fiction change the way novels are read and hence the way subsequent novels are written, and how, in turn, these works fare in the ideosphere over the long term. Hans Robert Jauss (1970) has done exactly this, though instead of "hill climbing" or "adaptive landscapes" he called it the expansion of reader horizons. In sum, AL might contribute substantially, in ways that have only begun to be suggested here, to our understanding of creative processes and the development of literature and art in culture.