Memes

[Kitsune]

Question, do you think that Memes are a valid concept?
They ma not have a rigorous scientific basis but there seems to be something to the concept in my opinion

[Broomstick]

Just so we can all be assured we are using the word the same way, please provide a fairly rigorous definition of "meme". Thank you.

[Kitsune]

A meme is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."

[Mr Bean]

A meme is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."

Memes are a descriptor word for something sociologists have known about for centuries but not put to any one snappy word. The name has been hijacked a bit in popular culture but it's still to my knowledge a useful technical term for describing everything from how slave naming conventions change over time. To the speed of religious adoption rates. Or even the redefinition of bedrock concepts like "what is feminine" as small changes spread from points until what was feminine last century becomes masculine this century.

[Formless]

The problem with memes starts with the idea that they are supposed to be discreet pieces of information * . Online memes can give a false impression, because online everything is delivered in discreet packets of information. Everyone knows what a "rickroll" is because they can point you to the video and then tell you about the trick or tricks used to lure people there. Ditto any other "viral" phenomenon. However, in real life information doesn't come in such discreet packets. Every time you interact with me, you are getting information from my appearance, my tone, my manner, my words, the physical location we met at, and so forth. These factors are always present in real life, and all models of communication have to take them into account. Even in text, my writing style effects your perception of how reliable or trustworthy I am. Communication is a process, and in the sense that culture exists between people communicating than so to is it a process. You can't just break this information into conveniently reductionist memes and expect to understand how the information has passed between us.

If no other communicative/cognitive process existed that kills it, it would be our perceptual filters. Even if you say that this introduces "mutation" or some other crap, how did that perceptual filter come to be in the first place? Clearly some of it comes from our interaction, but not all of it. And that filter will influence every "meme" that you encounter, thus rendering the concept all but useless because no meme will survive that filter unscathed. That's why real sociologists and anthropologists don't have time for this nonsense, except as a very abstract tool of analysis where conclusions about things other than memes are being drawn. And besides, they had that tool before it was called "memes". It also gets called ideas, concepts, fashions, signs, symbols, stereotypes, values, morals, cliches, tropes (ugh... did I just say that?), and so on. Our language is replete with words that mean the same thing, but are far more specific and meaningful.

Now, this is important because understanding what happens to "memes" when they go through a communication medium or someone's perceptual filter and why will help you communicate your own ideas more accurately. Noise, excessive and distracting information, existing stereotypes, cultural norms, personal relationship, form of address or argument, and so on are all things you have to take into account on a daily basis and adjust to.

* ironically, for an idea that was supposed to be "sound alike" for "genes", it later turned out that this same problem exists in genetics! But that's for another thread.

[Spoonist]

Quoting myself from 2006
http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 3#p2114133
"Memes are just another way of labling human behavior. Since it describes an already existing observation it is pretty much proven at its basics. You could have a whole discussion regarding human behavior where you substitute the words so that you never have to say the word meme or its deratives. So the basic concept itself is non-debatable, it is just a question if you understand it and wish to use that way to describe those observable phenomena with those types of words.
What the criticism usually is about are when people discuss what memes or memeplexes can do, how they propogate and how they relate to the hardwiring of the human mind. But those discussions where all there before the concept of memes. "

The problem with memes starts with the idea that they are supposed to be discreet pieces of information * . ... However, in real life information doesn't come in such discreet packets. ... You can't just break this information into conveniently reductionist memes and expect to understand how the information has passed between us. ... And that filter will influence every "meme" that you encounter, thus rendering the concept all but useless because no meme will survive that filter unscathed.

Strawman.
This shows a misunderstanding of both the use by Dawkins and the popularization of that use decades later by people like Susan Blackmore.
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf ... SC_a_00057

That's why real sociologists and anthropologists don't have time for this nonsense, except as a very abstract tool of analysis where conclusions about things other than memes are being drawn.

True scotsman.
Its easy to find "real" sociologists and especially anthropologists that use memes and its deratives in their research. Please try again.

And besides, they had that tool before it was called "memes". It also gets called ideas, concepts, fashions, signs, symbols, stereotypes, values, morals, cliches, tropes (ugh... did I just say that?), and so on. Our language is replete with words that mean the same thing, but are far more specific and meaningful.

Actually why meme in its new form is appearing a lot is specifically because it isn't an old word with a new technical meaning in a specific field of study. It is because of it being more general than any of your examples and because it is 'created' that makes it so useful in some contexts.
If I use the words, idea/concept/symbol/values/etc, all of those would have different meaning in different contexts, they would also be confusing to laymen outside of the field of study since they exist in so many forms and meanings. This means that there is room for a word like meme as a shortcut to include all of those above, but giving a specific context of evolutionary anthropology without having to explain it every time. There are lots of people who would never use the word meme in their papers or academic circles but still use it when talking or writing to the public.

What Fromless is really ranting about is memetics as a scientific field of study and some of its more fringe proponents. What really got people in anthropology pissed was when so many people from other fields appropriated the word meme and put it to their own use. There are countless of memetic studies in the field of computer science and economics for instance.
That however does not discredit its use nor its usefulness. Especially when writing for a mixed audience of scientists in the field and laymen at the same time.
For instance when talking about HBE (human behavioral ecology) or DIT (dual inheritance theory) memetics is mentioned or refered to a lot. Sometimes its usefulness is specifically to show popular public misconceptions about evolutionary anthropology.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_yl ... as_sdt=0,5
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22 ... s_ylo=2009

Its similar to how "IT" (information technology) was scorned by those in the actual programming and computer sciences when it first arrived because it was used by management or economists in a wide range of falsifiable uses. But which nowadays is simply a generic word for stuff relating to computers. So much so that you'd probably be hard pressed to find anyone in the "IT-business" that still remembers the controversy or the resistance to the word.

[Formless]

Spoonist, you can go play in traffic, and here is why:

Memes as discrete units

Richard Dawkins initially defined meme as a noun that "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation".[6]

"We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that 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'."

It doesn't get any more explicit than that, unless you have no idea what the word "unit" means. But let us dive into your trivial shitpost anyway, because there is much for us to talk about. And by talk, I mean shove up your dishonest ass.

Strawman.
This shows a misunderstanding of both the use by Dawkins and the popularization of that use decades later by people like Susan Blackmore.
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf ... SC_a_00057

He intended it to be analogous to genes, at a time when this was the interpretation of genetics. It also doesn't help that it was coined in Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene, where he talks about them as "units of cultural transmission". Your own source says that at the time, the paradigm was to see genes as analogous to sentences, and his work merely shifted the paradigm towards seeing them as self-replicating patterns... but still discrete. In other words, he knew damn well what he was implying about memes to anyone who bought his book. So you can take your strawman accusations and shout them at a mirror.

Your source only serves to outrage me with how inappropriately chosen it is. I talk about discreteness: it never mentions it. It wants to talk about the idea of a "selfish meme", and it outlines this on page two! In fact, it even gives the context in which the meme was supposed to be gene-like: that at the time, genes were considered "like sentences", implying completeness and therefor discreteness as well. It objects to the way in which Dawkins' original concept went from metaphor to Intentional Agent to advertising technique via reification. Fine. Not my problem. This thread is about memes as they are currently conceived, not how you wish they were. The paper objects to the way in which the concept was reinterpreted by Dennet and Hofstadter, and even calls their work more influential than The Selfish Gene... but then casually dismisses their contribution! And on the grounds that "because the contribution from Dawkins in The Mind’s I wasn’t really Dawkins’ writing. It isn’t his “meme.”" Why should we give a fuck? That's basically No True Scottsmann right there. It even admits that Dawkins himself changed his tune about the idea, so semantically you can't honestly claim that its not his concept, only that it changed in Dawkins mind after reading The Mind's I. More accurate to say that it is not The Selfish Gene's concept of the meme, which I repeat still contained the implications I find problematic despite your bitching. It talks about places where its thinkers admit the model breaks down; great, lets talk about those! It doesn't help your case, though.

Besides...

That's why real sociologists and anthropologists don't have time for this nonsense, except as a very abstract tool of analysis where conclusions about things other than memes are being drawn.

True scotsman.
Its easy to find "real" sociologists and especially anthropologists that use memes and its deratives in their research. Please try again.

You just love reading your own words into other people's writing, but it doesn't pass a sniff test. I said that they are potentially useful as abstract tools, and there are even critics which agree with me such as Jeremy Burman. And I'm not the only one who thinks that the tool predates Dawkins, hell predates science. Semiotics practically IS this field, but with its own history stemming from linguistics.

Were you expecting that I wouldn't notice how you chopped up my post into cherrypicked, stitched together sentences so that you could misrepresent me? I don't know whether you think you were summarizing or what, but copy+paste takes very little time or effort, unlike systematically removing the following, and everyone knows to just scroll down the page to see your rebuttal. I can only assume that these are intentional attempts to unfairly discredit what I wrote:

1) cherrypicking out my argument that culture is a communicative process based on the fact that it exists between human beings; whereas a memetic definition of culture abstracts it into competing, discrete "memes" or "memeplexes" (depending on how pretentious you want to sound) regardless of whose definition we are using.

2) cherrypicking out the parts where I talked about the holistic nature of information perception in real life interactions, including the significant length I went too to show how important the effect of pre-existing perceptions are when encountering new information, from all the senses. The very way we see the world is literally determined by our perceptions: tribal people are not fooled by many of the same optical illusions westerners are, such as the angled line trick which supposedly underlies how art depicts depth. Ever wonder how that could come to be? Obviously not.

3) bringing Richard Dawkins into the picture, when I never fucking mentioned him. I left him out of the picture on purpose, because he is irrelevant. I will say that again: Richard Dawkins is irrelevant to this thread. Others, like Daniel Dennet, Douglas Hofstadter, and Susan Blackmore have all contributed to the concept of a "meme" and it doesn't matter who or what you cite on this fact. If you want to act like Dawkins definition of memes is the only one worth talking about, you can again yell your accusations of fallicious reasoning at a mirror. They will stick, I promise. Because you are using the exact fallacies you accuse me of using. If I was one to psychoanalyze, I would assume its some kind of defense mechanism on your part.

You blew any pretense of honesty out the window with that one, buddy. You could not have chosen a worse way to start a debate on this subject.

What really got people in anthropology pissed was when so many people from other fields appropriated the word meme and put it to their own use. There are countless of memetic studies in the field of computer science and economics for instance.
That however does not discredit its use nor its usefulness. Especially when writing for a mixed audience of scientists in the field and laymen at the same time.
For instance when talking about HBE (human behavioral ecology) or DIT (dual inheritance theory) memetics is mentioned or refered to a lot. Sometimes its usefulness is specifically to show popular public misconceptions about evolutionary anthropology.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_yl ... as_sdt=0,5
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22 ... s_ylo=2009

Its similar to how "IT" (information technology) was scorned by those in the actual programming and computer sciences when it first arrived because it was used by management or economists in a wide range of falsifiable uses. But which nowadays is simply a generic word for stuff relating to computers. So much so that you'd probably be hard pressed to find anyone in the "IT-business" that still remembers the controversy or the resistance to the word.

Why shouldn't social scientists object to having people from completely unrelated fields come in and act like they own the place? No scientist likes that, because even qualified scientists from other fields have this tendency to shoot their ignorant mouths off. Biologists hate when physicists try to talk biology, because they have a history of saying things about evolution that are totally loony. Its the same thing. Economics is not anthropology, although it is related to sociology. Philosophers are perhaps the worst in the context of social sciences, because most people can't tell the difference and philosophy has always talked about "human nature" since time immemorial.

Just because someone is trying to start a new field doesn't mean that it will become a dominant perspective, or is even valid. Most of the time, it turns out to be hogwash and pseudoscience. And this is important, because you have not addressed it, and seem to be actively avoiding the problem: I object to the whole so called field of "evolutionary anthropology". Its that perception issue I talked about. Because that is well in evidence. In fact, it has even been demonstrated to death by economists! Both social perception and even visual! (So I guess Economists are good for something! ) The idea of memes and cultural "selection" is, I propose, not nearly as well evidenced. It is an assumption, or else a tool. Untested assumptions are the bane of good science. The existence of a trend, even among scientists, does not mean the trend is correct.

And to call what you posted as a "trend" is pushing it. One bit of information you forgot to take into account in your searches was the number of times a given paper has been cited, which is one measure of how seriously it was taken by other scientists. In your first search ("human behavioral ecology" memetics) the highest count was 490 for a book called Sense and nonsense: Evolutionary perspectives on human behaviour which is about evolutionary psychology in the broader sense. The next most was 26 for a paper called "Technological variation in the earliest Oldowan from Gona, Afar, Ethiopia" in the Journal of human evolution, and its all downhill from there. That should tell you something about how seriously the rest of the studies are being taken on that search result. Oh, but I did find a book result from your search string everyone should take note of: Human Culture Is More than Memes and Transmission. The other search string ("dual inheritance theory" memetics) maxed out at 62 for Culture evolves, which from reading the abstract seems like a scatter-shot of general ideas about animal culture, the effect of culture on evolution rather than vice verse, and yeah possibly some stuff that might be related to memetics depending on how you read it.

But by contrast, the search string cultural differences in visual perception gives only one paper with less than 100 citations on the first page and 837,000 hits. Not all of them are about visual perception, granted, but from looking all of those hits are about cognitive or social perception, so that should give you a pretty good idea of how much more seriously those topics are taken by their fields.

What Fromless is really ranting about is memetics as a scientific field of study and some of its more fringe proponents.

Do you fancy yourself a mind reader, or does horseshit pour out of your mouth on its own? This, simply put, is a lie. I have shown that it is a lie, created by misrepresenting my words to suit your agenda. Furthermore, your own source shows its falsehood by demonstrating how it is used and abused, and does not conflict with my arguments. In short, get out.

[Spoonist]

Spoonist, you can go play in traffic, and here is why:

How is that inferiority complex working out for you?
Why your position was and still is a strawman was because you tried to dismiss something using counters to something which they never claimed. They never claimed that a meme would only be a "discreet package", nor did they claim that these discreet packages would "will survive that [human] filter unscathed". Talking about perceptual filters as if that disproves memes is a complete strawman since such filters were and are included in its use.
Dawkins original example was human culture. For you to say that human perception disproves a new way to describe human culture is simply bewildering and shows that you have not read the source and are acting out a bias based on prejudice.
Here is the very next passage after the one you quoted from Dawkins:
"Examples of 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. " (Dawkins - The Selfish Gene).

Lets move into the slugfest:

It doesn't get any more explicit than that

Actually it does. Because just about any scientist will then very explicitly lay out what he means, like Dawkins, see below.

unless you have no idea what the word "unit" means.

Are you really trying to go that low? I'd recommend limbo excercises. Here I'd say its pretty obvious that the word "unit" doesn't mean "discreet packets". Please check it out in any dictionary. A military unit losing one soldier is still a unit, then when they replace that loss with a new soldier it is still a unit. If it gets an extra or its equip is replaced it is still a unit.
But its worse than that, here is Dawkins again adressing that very point back in 1976:
"So far I have talked of memes as though it was obvious what a single unit-meme consisted of. But of course it is far from obvious. I have said a tune is one meme, but what about a symphony: how many memes is that? Is each movement one meme, each recognizable phrase of melody, each bar, each chord, or what?
I appeal to the same verbal trick as I used in Chapter 3. There I divided the 'gene complex' into large and small genetic units, and units within units. The 'gene' was defined, not in a rigid all-or-none way, but as a unit of convenience, a length of chromosome with just sufficient copying-fidelity to serve as a viable unit of natural selection. If a single phrase of Beethoven's ninth symphony is sufficiently distinctive and memorable to be abstracted from the context of the whole symphony, and used as the call-sign of a maddeningly intrusive European broadcasting station, then to that extent it deserves to be called one meme. It has, incidentally, materially diminished my capacity to enjoy the original symphony.
Similarly, when we say that all biologists nowadays believe in Darwin's theory, we do not mean that every biologist has, graven in his brain, an identical copy of the exact words of Charles Darwin himself. Each individual has his own way of interpreting Darwin's ideas. He probably learned them not from Darwin's own writings, but from more recent authors. Much of what Darwin said is, in detail, wrong."

So please try again, this time a bit more coherently if you may...

But let us dive into your trivial shitpost anyway, because there is much for us to talk about. And by talk, I mean shove up your dishonest ass.

Ah, its because you are more interested in my ass than actual facts that you get it wrong, ok I'm fine with that since it is a nice one.

Your own source says that at the time, the paradigm was to see genes as analogous to sentences, and his work merely shifted the paradigm towards seeing them as self-replicating patterns... but still discrete. In other words, he knew damn well what he was implying about memes to anyone who bought his book. So you can take your strawman accusations and shout them at a mirror.

Nice of you to admit that you haven't read "the selfish gene" you can find it here.
Also the strawman accusation stands, none of what you said is a valid criticism of memes. Mind you, there are valid criticism, the ones listed in your post just isn't among them.

Your source only serves to outrage me with how inappropriately chosen it is.

Something which gives an outline to the history and popularization of a topic is somehow inappropriate for that topic? Right after I mentioned that popularization? Sweet jesus you have some issues.

I talk about discreteness: it never mentions it.

There are some obvious reasons for that you know...

In fact, it even gives the context in which the meme was supposed to be gene-like: that at the time, genes were considered "like sentences", implying completeness and therefor discreteness as well.

Nope, that is just part of your biased strawman. It does not imply completeness nor does it imply discreetness either. Unless you are using those in a very different way than most do.
Maybe that would be something valid to build upon? What is your defintion of discreetness in this context and how would such discreetness invalidate passing through human perception?

This thread is about memes as they are currently conceived, not how you wish they were.

Actually what this thread is about is mostly construed by the OP but as you very well know it will mutate and evolve beyond that by human interaction, just like most ideas, concepts, fashions, signs, symbols, stereotypes, values, morals, cliches, tropes and memes.

The paper objects to the way in which the concept was reinterpreted by Dennet and Hofstadter, and even calls their work more influential than The Selfish Gene... but then casually dismisses their contribution! And on the grounds that "because the contribution from Dawkins in The Mind’s I wasn’t really Dawkins’ writing. It isn’t his “meme.”" Why should we give a fuck? That's basically No True Scottsmann right there. It even admits that Dawkins himself changed his tune about the idea, so semantically you can't honestly claim that its not his concept, only that it changed in Dawkins mind after reading The Mind's I. More accurate to say that it is not The Selfish Gene's concept of the meme, which I repeat still contained the implications I find problematic despite your bitching. It talks about places where its thinkers admit the model breaks down; great, lets talk about those! It doesn't help your case, though.

Why we should give a fuck? Because its a paper on the history of memes. Then it should be interesting to see how the perception and definition has changed over time. Nothing more nothing less.
Why do you get so worked up about that part?
And yes by each iteration of the model some parts doesn't fully translate to genes. This much was obvious even back in 1976. It wasn't and isn't the intention. And yes depending on whose model you are talking about they break down here and there, but not where you are pointing.
My bitching is that your statements was not valid.

That's why real sociologists and anthropologists don't have time for this nonsense, except as a very abstract tool of analysis where conclusions about things other than memes are being drawn.

True scotsman.
Its easy to find "real" sociologists and especially anthropologists that use memes and its deratives in their research. Please try again.

You just love reading your own words into other people's writing, but it doesn't pass a sniff test. I said that they are potentially useful as abstract tools, and there are even critics which agree with me such as Jeremy Burman. And I'm not the only one who thinks that the tool predates Dawkins, hell predates science. Semiotics practically IS this field, but with its own history stemming from linguistics.

Ah I see, me quoting you directly is my words? Really? Do you mean that you retract the view that real ones don't have time for this nonsense?
Me pointing out that yes indeed 'real' sociologists and anthropologists do indeed have time for this and why, somehow equates to me reading my words in your writing? How?
No no no, that doesn't fly. You got caught with a true scotsman, deal with it, don't gripe about it.
Or are you saying that it isn't easy to find 'real' sociologists and anthropologists who use this as something more than an abstract tool?
Yes, the concept and even the word meme predates and postdates Dawkins. That is an argument for it, not against it.
Why it is used is simple, if you talk about semiotics+signs and very few would know what you are talking about. But if you are talking about memetics+memes lots of people know what you are talking about. Hence my IT reference.
Run an nGram chart on the two and you will see where this is going.
So the smart sociologists and anthropologists, who like their grants, who want to get references/cites and want their books to sell use keywords that are more popular then ones that isn't. Go figure, its almost like that was pointed out to you by someone...

Were you expecting that I wouldn't notice how you chopped up my post into cherrypicked, stitched together sentences so that you could misrepresent me? I don't know whether you think you were summarizing or what, but copy+paste takes very little time or effort, unlike systematically removing the following, and everyone knows to just scroll down the page to see your rebuttal. I can only assume that these are intentional attempts to unfairly discredit what I wrote:

Cherrypicked? *Adding paranoia to the list.*
No need to unfairly discredit what you wrote, you do that splendidly on your own.

1) cherrypicking out my argument that culture is a communicative process based on the fact that it exists between human beings; whereas a memetic definition of culture abstracts it into competing, discrete "memes" or "memeplexes" (depending on how pretentious you want to sound) regardless of whose definition we are using.

*sigh* The competing part isn't an abstraction it is an addition. On top of being a communicative process it is also competing. It is the proposal that evolutionary forces could also be working on ideas and thus culture.
But you are simply wrong that memes doesn't take human interaction into account, nor that it would disprove the usefulness of memes.

2) cherrypicking out the parts where I talked about the holistic nature of information perception in real life interactions, including the significant length I went too to show how important the effect of pre-existing perceptions are when encountering new information, from all the senses. The very way we see the world is literally determined by our perceptions: tribal people are not fooled by many of the same optical illusions westerners are, such as the angled line trick which supposedly underlies how art depicts depth. Ever wonder how that could come to be? Obviously not.

Again, yes culture is about perception, and no that doesn't invalidate memes since those perceptions are included.

3) bringing Richard Dawkins into the picture, when I never fucking mentioned him. I left him out of the picture on purpose, because he is irrelevant. I will say that again: Richard Dawkins is irrelevant to this thread. Others, like Daniel Dennet, Douglas Hofstadter, and Susan Blackmore have all contributed to the concept of a "meme" and it doesn't matter who or what you cite on this fact. If you want to act like Dawkins definition of memes is the only one worth talking about, you can again yell your accusations of fallicious reasoning at a mirror. They will stick, I promise. Because you are using the exact fallacies you accuse me of using. If I was one to psychoanalyze, I would assume its some kind of defense mechanism on your part.

*sigh* Really? Me bringing Dawkins into a thread about memes is cherrypicking? WTF?
You are like a creationist trying to disprove evolution by saying the eye is irreducible, then me pointing out that even Darwin covered the eye way back when, then you come back griping about Darwin being wrong.
Yes, Dawkins is mostly irrelevant towards memetics today, but even he adressed and countered the point you tried to make.

You blew any pretense of honesty out the window with that one, buddy. You could not have chosen a worse way to start a debate on this subject.

The three bullets above are not any proof of dishonesty nor cherrypicking. Please ask a sane person to read my post and he/she will tell you the same.

Why shouldn't social scientists object to having people from completely unrelated fields come in and act like they own the place? No scientist likes that, because even qualified scientists from other fields have this tendency to shoot their ignorant mouths off. Biologists hate when physicists try to talk biology, because they have a history of saying things about evolution that are totally loony. Its the same thing. Economics is not anthropology, although it is related to sociology. Philosophers are perhaps the worst in the context of social sciences, because most people can't tell the difference and philosophy has always talked about "human nature" since time immemorial.

Agreed to all in this quote, I was merely trying to give the background to Kitsune and others why you were behaving like a raving madman.

And to call what you posted as a "trend" is pushing it. One bit of information you forgot to take into account in your searches was the number of times a given paper has been cited, which is one measure of how seriously it was taken by other scientists. ...snip... That should tell you something about how seriously the rest of the studies are being taken on that search result.

I didn't claim it was a "trend". (If you'd ask I'd say that the "trend" was a decade ago and declining.)
Your claim was that 'real' ones didn't bother. I said it was easy to find those who does.
Your claim was that there are other words that are "more specific and meaningful". I explained why people use it even in academia, specifically because it is more specific then the examples you gave, especially when targeting laymen.
Which part of that didn't you understand?
Here, let me quote myself: "This means that there is room for a word like meme as a shortcut to include all of those above, but giving a specific context of evolutionary anthropology without having to explain it every time. There are lots of people who would never use the word meme in their papers or academic circles but still use it when talking or writing to the public. "
So - given the context of that quote, don't you think that the number of cites is pretty much useless as a counterargument?

But by contrast, the search string ...snip... gives only one paper with less than 100 citations on the first page and 837,000 hits. Not all of them are about visual perception, granted, but from looking all of those hits are about cognitive or social perception, so that should give you a pretty good idea of how much more seriously those topics are taken by their fields.

Cites are redundant in context, but...
Do I need to explain why a google scholar would give more and better hits to [human behavioral ecology] than ["human behavioral ecology"]? Do I need to explain why more cites would give more hits?

This had to be addressed last "What Fromless is really ranting about is memetics as a scientific field of study and some of its more fringe proponents."
Do you fancy yourself a mind reader, or does horseshit pour out of your mouth on its own? This, simply put, is a lie.

Uhm, I don't have to have any superpowers to see where your argument comes from. You even confirm them in the passage above about social scientists.
If you were not upset about "memetics as a scientific field of study" then I would have lied. Since you are upset about "memetics as a scientific field of study" I clearly have superpowers.
Lets boil it down: do you agree or disagree with:
1) 'Meme' is a word that exists, is used and has a definition in ordinary dictionaries.
2) There is less disambiguity about which topic one is talking about when using 'memes', whereas there is more disambiguity about which topic one is talking about when using "ideas, concepts, fashions, signs, symbols, stereotypes, values, morals". (I took away tropes and clichés since they are better defined but usually not mentioned in context in academia anyway).
3) A scientist in the field of sociology and/or anthropology can use the word meme(s) in a constructive way without agreeing with 'memetics theory'.

I have shown that it is a lie, created by misrepresenting my words to suit your agenda. Furthermore, your own source shows its falsehood by demonstrating how it is used and abused, and does not conflict with my arguments. In short, get out.

You can delude yourself if you wish, that is your perogative. But...
It wasn't a lie. I didn't misrperesent you. My 'source' was about the popularization, not proving nor disproving my point.
In short, calm down.

[Formless]

I have a longer post coming, so wait for it. I feel like if I included this it would just be tedious, so for posterity:

True scotsman.
Its easy to find "real" sociologists and especially anthropologists that use memes and its deratives in their research. Please try again.

You just love reading your own words into other people's writing, but it doesn't pass a sniff test. I said that they are potentially useful as abstract tools, and there are even critics which agree with me such as Jeremy Burman. And I'm not the only one who thinks that the tool predates Dawkins, hell predates science. Semiotics practically IS this field, but with its own history stemming from linguistics.

Ah I see, me quoting you directly is my words? Really? Do you mean that you retract the view that real ones don't have time for this nonsense?

Like I said, you should really read that source I found in your search strings:

Other Definitions of Culture

Before proceeding to an analysis of concurrences, it may be worthwhile, as an aside, to point out that the social transmission model of culture is only one of many definitions that have been proposed over many decades of social and anthropological theorizing. In fact, the social transmission definition of culture seems to have been either ignored or rejected by the majority of cultural anthropologists. Recent surveys of anthropological theory either fail to mention it at all, (Barnard 2003, Borofsky 1994, Layton 1997l, Moore 1997) or dismiss it in a few sentences (Harris 1999). One chapter in an edited volume (McGee and Warms 1996) discuss related topics, but it was omitted completely from a recent critical review of the concept of culture within anthropology (kuper 1999).

Notice that? Notice how he not only says few anthropologists (you know, the people whose field is all about culture) take memetics seriously, but even has the sources to evidence it? Your search string, my evidence.

And what the hell, maybe there are people who have problems reading google books, here's the next couple paragraphs (that I can see):

There are probably several reasons why the transmission model of culture has been so largely ignored within anthropology. I suspect, without being able to document it, that one of the most important reasons is that anthropologists perceive it as arid, overly simplified, and incapable of describing the richness of what they observe in the field. It would be like trying to understand Shakespeare by doing a statistical analysis of his vocabulary.

Much of the richness missed by a transmission model involves agreements within a society: their creation, their effects, and their modification or maintenance. [...]

He later goes on to describe how these conventions and social obligations (what he is calling "concurrences" here) can propagate in a manner similar to a meme, but because of the restrictions they put on every participant in the culture they don't have to, nor can they be simply called memes. You can play chess, you can know alternative rules for chess, but if you can't find anyone who wants to play those variations on chess, it doesn't matter. Rules of the road, language, morals, work appropriate behavior, games people play, institutions, and more all function this way. And these are the main elements of culture anthropologists (and other social scientists) study and consider essential to study. It boils down to this: if the field whose entire purpose is to study cultures at home and abroad don't find memes to be a very meaningful element of culture, why should anyone else?

I almost wonder if I need to say anything more, or if I'm wasting my time with the larger post I have currently staring at me on a text editor...

[Formless]

Yes, Dawkins is mostly irrelevant towards memetics today,

Then stop talking about Richard Dawkins! The history of the meme is NOT FUCKING RELEVANT TO THE OP. He never asked, and he gave the definition of a meme that actually fucking interests him. From now on, I am just going to ignore any point that has to do with Dawkins, and if you keep bringing him up I will be forced to consider it Broken Record debating.

How is that inferiority complex working out for you?
Why your position was and still is a strawman was because you tried to dismiss something using counters to something which they never claimed. They never claimed that a meme would only be a "discreet package", nor did they claim that these discreet packages would "will survive that [human] filter unscathed". Talking about perceptual filters as if that disproves memes is a complete strawman since such filters were and are included in its use.

Criticism of meme theory

An objection to the study of the evolution of memes in genetic terms (although not to the existence of memes) involves a perceived gap in the gene/meme analogy: the cumulative evolution of genes depends on biological selection-pressures neither too great nor too small in relation to mutation-rates. There seems no reason to think that the same balance will exist in the selection pressures on memes.[26]

Luis Benitez-Bribiesca M.D., 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 (analogous to the DNA of genes), and to the excessive instability of the meme mutation mechanism (that of an idea going from one brain to another), which would lead to a low replication accuracy and a high mutation rate, rendering the evolutionary process chaotic.[27]

I am only putting this non-imaginary criticism into the context of a mechanism that would render it too unstable for an evolutionary metaphor to actually work (perceptions). Do some basic research or shut the fuck up. I know you don't like the evolution of the word "meme", but that doesn't excuse ignorance of other people's points of view.

Maybe that would be something valid to build upon? What is your defintion of discreetness in this context and how would such discreetness invalidate passing through human perception?

The following contains my emphasis in places:

Noun

discreteness (uncountable)

The state or quality of being discrete, separated or distinct.

Adjective

discrete (comparative more discrete, superlative most discrete)

1.Separate; distinct; individual; non-continuous.

2. That can be perceived individually and not as connected to, or part of something else.

Adjective

distinct (comparative more distinct, superlative most distinct)

1. Capable of being perceived very clearly. [examples snipped from 1-4]
2. Different from one another (with the preferable adposition being "from").
3. Noticeably different from others; distinctive.
4. Separate in place; not conjunct or united; with from.
5. (obsolete) Distinguished; having the difference marked; separated by a visible sign; marked out; specified.

Milton

Wherever thus created — for no place / Is yet distinct by name.
6. (obsolete) Marked; variegated.

Spenser

The which [place] was dight / With divers flowers distinct with rare delight.

adjective

individually separate and distinct:
speech sounds are produced as a continuous sound signal rather than discrete units

As you can see, being a unit of something is precisely one of the defining features of a discrete object. Furthermore, something discrete is distinct and identifiable, as most people agree memes are definable as. You can add the idea of a memeplex, but that just means that it is made up of memes, lego block style, just as words are made up of syllables. The pattern is still distinct, and the word is still identifiable. Hell, even if you account for British spelling vs American. Or regional accent.

What part of this is hard for you to understand? Is it just some hangup with the English language I am not aware of? (being that you are, iirc, a native German speaker) Because by all definitions in the English language a meme is an identifiable unit, discrete in terms of its theoretical distinctiveness, and its proposed ability to remain identifiable even after being transferred through a communication medium, and survive mutations relatively intact.

My objection is that memes in verbal, face to face communication (which is the most important cultural medium as all others are slave to it) are not stable enough to matter. I am not unique in this objection. I also believe that perceptions are far more important culturally than memes precisely because of their ability to "mutate" incoming information, and that on a cognitive level they aren't simply another type of meme. Your criticisms attack me on the use of the definition of a meme as intentional agent (the main thrust of the paper you cited) when ALL definitions imply discreteness, distinctiveness, and/or their identifiable quality. Maybe you can find one that doesn't imply discreteness per say, but if a meme cannot be said to be identifiably different from other memes in a culture, of what use is meme theory to the social sciences? Answer me that.

Cherrypicked? *Adding paranoia to the list.*
No need to unfairly discredit what you wrote, you do that splendidly on your own.

Even if you had only ripped out this and only this part of my post, it would be cherrypicking and dishonest:

Every time you interact with me, you are getting information from my appearance, my tone, my manner, my words, the physical location we met at, and so forth. These factors are always present in real life, and all models of communication have to take them into account. Even in text, my writing style effects your perception of how reliable or trustworthy I am. Communication is a process, and in the sense that culture exists between people communicating than so to is it a process.

In other words, you completely disregarded the argument I gave for culture being defined as a communicative process. Good job. Now go sit on the special bus where you belong.

Cites are redundant in context, but...
Do I need to explain why a google scholar would give more and better hits to [human behavioral ecology] than ["human behavioral ecology"]? Do I need to explain why more cites would give more hits?

Really? You respond to a point about establishing the number of citations your average article would get if it were about something social scientists actually care about, and you respond by criticizing the number of hits the search string got? The whole point of getting more hits was to get a sense of the average article's citation count if it is about these other topics, so of course I wanted a more inclusive search string, you moron. And I apologize if the hits were a bit too inclusive, but that's the nature of Google Scholar and other search engines-- even your search strings got false positives.

It wasn't a lie. I didn't misrperesent you. My 'source' was about the popularization, not proving nor disproving my point.
In short, calm down.

I think you meant to write "your point", but if that's what you think you were writing two days ago (or now, for that matter) perhaps you should reconsider your use of the following words:

"ranting"

"Strawman"

"True Scottsman"

"misunderstanding"

"raving lunatic"

...you fucking illiterate.