Forum Overview :: American Beauty :: Those would be failed memes

[quote name="Mischief Devolver"]The thing most people miss about the concept of memes is that if ideas, concepts, and systems can be shaped by an analogue of natural selection, that means the current form of the ideas that scaffold our thinking are no longer the products of intelligent design. Let me clarify: they may indeed have originally had an intended purpose for which they were created, but their current form may not serve any purpose at all. So long as a meme is compelling to the human mind, that is all that is necessary for it to survive. Utility is unnecessary. Just as biological evolution is a threat to religion, because it's a system that makes God unnecessary, meme evolution can change your entire worldview because it makes many conspiracies unnecessary. Are systems in place that constantly make the rich richer no matter the situation because of a brilliant long-term conspiracy devised by the rich? Or does being reliably beneficial to the powerful simply make the meme more likely to survive and be propagated? *cough* Atlas Shrugged *cough* There are multiple mechanisms in place in our bodies to make our progeny more prone to mutation, therefore more adaptable to environmental changes and more evolve-able; from sex, to DNA shuffling in meiosis, to specific genes structurally more prone to mutation. By analogy, memes that don't make sense, or are self-contradictory, could actually have an evolutionary advantage over clear and straightforward ideas. Compelling memes that don't make sense are constantly being re-evaluated and reinterpreted until someone comes up with a new form of the meme that is even more compelling in this new environment than its parent meme. The big thing with internet memes is that the web gives the opportunity to observe the life-cycle of a meme in its entirety.[/quote]