Chapter One

Self-Sent Messages and Mass Belief

Man is what he believes. -- Anton Chekhov

A religious taboo against modern farm machines is growing more widespread among American farmers, and for an unusual reason. The taboo, held by Old Order Amish farmers, keeps increasing because it creates a need for manual labor. Amish farmers meet this need by raising many children, who start farm work very young. Consequently, these farmers pass their taboo down to a large number of children: many children, ergo many young taboo-holders. As documented in John Hostetler's Amish Society, their population doubles in just twenty-three years--much faster than the American or even world population doubles. With each generation, the Amish ideas rule a larger percentage of American farmers' lives.

The Self-Propagating Idea

The Amish farming taboo is a self-propagating idea, or thought contagion. Though that taboo has not yet become a widespread norm, many self-propagating ideas achieved that level of success decades, generations, even centuries ago. Overlooked by established social sciences, thought contagion warrants more attention as a force shaping society.

Like a software virus in a computer network or a physical virus in a city, thought contagions proliferate by effectively "programming" for their own retransmission. Beliefs affect retransmission in so many ways that they set off a colorful, unplanned growth race among diverse "epidemics" of ideas. Actively contagious ideas are now called memes by students of the newly emerging science of memetics.

Though the analogy between cultural and biological contagion was recognized since at least the 1950s, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins expressed it at full strength in the last chapter of his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. This short chapter, in which Dawkins coins the word meme, launched a slowly smoldering first twenty years of memetics. Those decades also saw comparable contributions by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, among others.

The present book aims to expand memetics far beyond an academic curiosity by examining its vast relevance to how society thinks and lives. A treatment of this new field can presently offer just an outline, a thumbnail sketch of a far-reaching science. Yet seeing the new paradigm linked with so many important aspects of life imparts a revised world view, one that renders apparently arbitrary currents of culture freshly comprehensible.

Modes of Thought Contagion

The ways that memes retransmit fit into seven general patterns called modes: quantity parental, efficiency parental, proselytic, preservational, adversative, cognitive, and motivational modes. Each one involves a thought contagion's "carrier," or host, serving to increase the idea's "infected" group, or host population.

The Quantity of Parenthood

Any idea influencing its hosts to have more children than they would otherwise have exhibits quantity parental transmission. Because of children's special receptivity to parental ideas, increasing the number of children increases the projected number of host offspring. So the Amish farming taboo has a quantity parental advantage.

Far more prevalent in North America is the taboo against masturbation. Its vast influence shows up clearly in the recent "Sex in America Survey," and vividly in events that brought down a recent surgeon general.

The Census Bureau does not track fertility rates for this taboo's hosts, so its quantity parental effect is less demonstrable than that of the Amish faith. Yet educated guesswork suggests that the masturbation taboo raises its adherents' reproduction rate above average levels. Taboo hosts generally have fewer acceptable options for reacting to sex drives. They must either mate more often, abstain more often, or both. The resulting behavioral mix should bring more children to the taboo's host population. Even hosts whose masturbation remains unabated would still experience guilt as a motive to seek entirely partnered sex. This group's greater effort toward mating would presumably yield more children to inculcate with the taboo.

The number of extra children per generation need not be great to explain the masturbation taboo's widespread propagation. The secret lies in the taboo's very great age. Even a 5 percent per generation increase amounts to a 132-fold increase when compounded over 100 generations. A reproductive effect imperceptible to any one generation can gently elevate the idea from fringe group status to mainstream proportions. Such modern influences as publicized sex research have reversed some of the taboo's gains, though the subject of masturbation still troubles many.

The Efficiency of Parenthood

Simply having children cannot guarantee that any will embrace the parents' beliefs. Yet some beliefs actually stack their odds of acceptance by guiding the methods of parenthood. Any idea increasing the fraction of its hosts' children who eventually adopt their parents' meme exhibits efficiency parental transmission.

To illustrate, Amish carry a belief that Amish must stay highly separated from non-Amish. This separatism saturates Amish children with Amish ideas (including separatism) while "protecting" them from non-Amish memes. So Amish separatists impart their faith to offspring more successfully than do non-separatist Amish. This keeps the majority of Amish abidingly separatist. By staying segregated, the Amish get 78 percent of their children to stick with the faith in a predominantly non-Amish country. The same transmission efficiency gained by Amish separatism may also intensify other separatist movements around the world.

The evolutionary biologists Eva Jablonka and Eytan Avital in Israel recently coined the name phenotypic cloning to describe such parentally replicated memes in humans and other animals. Their work focuses mainly on basic skills, but the concept applies equally to everything from ingrained personalities to conscious beliefs.

Proselytizing Pays

Thought contagions spread fastest via proselytic transmission. A proselytic idea's hosts generally pass the idea to people other than just their own children. Such propagation is not slowed by the years needed to raise children. Host populations seldom double parentally every ten years, but a proselytically spreading idea, under suitable conditions, can double its host population in a year or less.

The conviction that "My country is dangerously low on weapons" illustrates proselytic advantage. The idea strikes fear in its hosts for both their own and their compatriots' lives. That fear drives them to persuade others about military weakness to build pressure for doing something about it. So the belief, through the side effect of fear, triggers proselytizing. Meanwhile, alternative opinions such as "My country has enough weaponry" promote a sense of security and less urgency about changing others' minds. Thus, belief in a weapons shortage can self-propagate to majority proportions--even in a country of unmatched strength. In the United States, the meme spread widely during the late 1970s and early 1980s despite a great superiority in military hardware. Though the impressive buildup that followed may have helped end the cold war, the prerequisite opinion shift came from thought contagions spreading in people who expected a permanent cold war.

Proselytic thought contagion becomes self-limiting as host population growth diminishes the supply of nonhosts. Few nonhosts remain by the time the host population is a great majority since most have already converted by then. Without enough nonhosts, especially persuadable ones, the proselytizing cannot win many new adherents. This creates cycles in which successful proselytic movements lose momentum, setting the stage for renewed outbreaks of old movements and initial outbreaks of new movements.

Preserving Belief

In the preservational mode, ideas influence their hosts to remain hosts for a long time. The idea may influence its adherents to live longer, or make them avoid dropping out.

A belief that "One should never argue religion or politics" illustrates the dropout-prevention form. The belief substantially immunizes its hosts against religious or political proselytism. This reduces their chances of conversion to any persuasion that emphasizes proselytism--a persuasion that one should argue religion or politics. Thus, the argument-avoiding belief preserves its own existence among adherents.

The belief may achieve majority status in people who remain unconverted by proselytic religion and politics, leaving proselytic movements to solicit an increasingly "resistant strain" of nonhosts.

Sabotaging the Competition

If every proselytic movement spawns a stubborn resistance, the memetic contests would all grind down to stalemates. Yet often they don't. When proselytic zealots become stymied, the only memetic variants that continue to spread are those that carry the movement to a more aggressive phase.

In the adversative mode, ideas influence their hosts to attack or sabotage competing movements. That is, the host can either harm nonhost individuals or destroy their memes' ability to spread.

Both mechanisms occur with the Muslim belief--supported by the Koran--that God rewards those who fight and kill for Islam. First, this idea programs some hosts to selectively kill those who refuse to convert to Islam. Provided that this meme does not lose too many of its own people in the process, the killing increases the relative size of its Islamic host population. Second, adherents frighten many surviving non-Muslims into silence, largely destroying their idea's proselytic contagiousness. This, too, reduces the projected number of nonhosts, increasing the relative prevalence of Islam.

Adversative replication advantage occurs only when aggressive action results from the memes themselves, since only then can it favor one movement over another. Other antagonisms, such as those over resources, can happen just as well between like-minded believers--and do not generally work as memetic advantages.

Cognitive Advantage

If an idea seems well founded to most people exposed to it, then nonhosts tend to adopt it, and hosts tend to retain it. That perceived cogency to the total population provides an idea with its cognitive advantage.

Of course, what is perceived as cogent frequently errs from the truth. When Benjamin Franklin introduced the lightning rod, his idea seemed blasphemous to many clerics thundering from pulpits and presses--all because the populace still saw lightning as punishment from God. Whether an idea seems cogent to specific people depends upon matters ranging from what other ideas they already have to the neurobiology of humans in general.

One cognitively propagated idea is the belief that "the earth revolves around the sun." Its seeming consistency with many astronomer's observations of the sun at various times of the year made it popular among astronomers. The astronomers, regarded as honest and knowledgeable, then presented their theory to many others clearly and logically. Through its intellectual appeal, the idea gradually expanded its following from the intelligentsia of Copernicus' time to the schoolchildren of today.

Cognitively favored ideas usually spread more passively than ideas emphasizing the other modes. Rather than actively programming the host's retransmitting behavior, the belief's contagiousness depends heavily on the other ideas and cognitive traits of the population. Thus the cognitively propagated idea "is propagated" rather than "propagates itself."

Cognitive advantage plays a strong part in the efficiency parental, proselytic, and preservational modes. After all, perceived cogency largely determines whether a person will adopt an idea on hearing it and retain the idea after adopting it.

Motivational Advantage

Ideas can also passively amass their host populations through the motivational mode. In this mode, people adopt or retain an idea because they have some motive for doing so: that is, because they expect to be better off as hosts than as nonhosts. The larger the number of people who want to hold a specific idea, and the more strongly they want it, the greater will be its motivational advantage.

Tax revolts illustrate motivational propagation. Many taxpayers hearing the tax revolt meme feel economically motivated to adopt it, accounting for much of its spread. Adherents also feel economically motivated to pass along the idea once they have it, adding proselytism to the movement. Some people, ranging from rich to poor, even express tax revolt memes to give impressions of an affluence that shoulders taxes as its major expense. Still, the obvious motivational appeal of tax revolt ideas accounts for much of their prevalence, even though other factors contribute.

In the motivational mode, as in the cognitive, ideas do not self-propagate in a strong sense. Yet motivational propagation plays a frequent supporting role in the efficiency parental, proselytic, and preservational modes.

The Epidemiology of Ideas

Different modes of thought contagion usually occur together. Thus, a single idea has a propagative profile consisting of any advantages it has in each mode.

Memetic theory analyzes these propagative profiles in a manner resembling that used in epidemiology. An epidemiologist might conclude, for instance, that sneezing out virus particles accounts for much of the common cold's propagation; the virus's way of causing sneeze-triggering nasal irritation is what makes the cold so common. Similarly, a memeticist might determine that the weapons shortage belief spreads largely by proselytism; the idea's way of producing proselytism-motivating fear is what makes the belief so common. Memetics is, in part, an "epidemiology" of ideas.

Memetic folkways need not correspond to viral diseases, and so do not always deserve the same bad reputation. The belief that we should love our neighbors illustrates the benign nature of many thought contagions. The terms thought contagion and epidemiology therefore carry neutral connotations in the context of memetics theory.

Forming New Ideas

Thought contagions have an impact on thought creation as new ideas that seem spontaneously created often derive from preexisting ideas. Frequently, this happens by either altering, building upon, or fusing earlier notions. Yet usually much more than just having a precursor belief is necessary for a person to generate a new idea. Any one adherent of the earlier idea may be quite unlikely to form the new idea. But as the precursor spreads, the odds increase that someone will make that creative leap. Thought contagions therefore shape creative output at the population level.

As an example, the Mormon faith arose only after the widespread proliferation of the Christian faith. The distinctive Mormon tenet that Jesus of Nazareth visited North America explains the connection: because millions already believed that a true Christ had visited the Middle East, it was far more likely that someone would create the idea that he also visited North America. Very few individuals, Christian or not, create highly original beliefs like this one. Yet Christianity makes good potential starting material. So the more Christians, the greater the likelihood that someone somewhere will create the new variation. This means that all the contagious advantages of Christianity play a powerful role in setting worldwide formation rates for new, but related, ideas--including such Mormon ideas as the belief that Christ visited North America.

Recombining Ideas

Thought contagion also reshuffles old ideas into novel combinations. Sometimes the recombined beliefs hold new implications that spark completely new ideas. Other times, newly combined beliefs become novel thought contagions in their own right.

Recombination affects, for example, the belief in an imminent and inevitable doomsday. The doomsday idea alone probably does not inspire much proselytism; it may even inspire decisions to let others remain blissfully ignorant of their impending fate.

Now consider the religious belief that whoever dies an unbeliever goes to hell. The hell belief alone motivates hosts to convert friends and loved ones. It stirs enough proselytic urgency to spread itself far and wide in the population--far and wide enough that with near certainty it spreads to someone who holds or adopts the doomsday belief. So, the hell idea's contagiousness may get most of the credit for generating the first "hell-doomsday" combination.

The two ideas paired inspire more proselytic drive than they could separately. After all, an imminent doomsday leaves very little time to save unbelieving friends from hell. The combination's souped-up proselytic drive has greatly enriched the concentration of doomsayers among Christians who believe in hell.

Far-spreading beliefs meet up with each other more often, helping new combinations to selectively include the most vigorous of what went before. If the beliefs are mutually compatible as combined, the combination spreads even faster as a package. The fast-spreading package, in turn, meets up even faster with other spreading memes. This helps build elaborate bundles of memes that foster their own and each other's propagation.

Population memetics, the study of how proliferating memes combine and separate in a population, roughly parallels the study of how proliferating genes combine and separate, the branch of biology called population genetics. Indeed, the similarities inspired the zoologist Richard Dawkins to coin the word meme in vague resemblance to the word gene.

Yet the realm of ideas, or ideosphere, often departs from its analogy to the biosphere. For example, individual occurrences of genes "drop out" of the biosphere almost exclusively by "host" organism death. But an idea's occurrences may drop out either because hosts die or because hosts convert to nonhosts. This gives the evolution of memes a more complicated mathematical form than the evolution of genes.

Memetic Evolution

Meme propagation drives memetic innovation by helping generate and recombine ideas. The beliefs spreading most vigorously prevail in the natural selection of memes, giving them the best odds of spawning new variants and combinations. Such innovation, in turn, drives propagation by supplying both new and strengthened thought contagions. Meme propagation and innovation thus accomplish the great feedback system of Darwinian evolution in the ideosphere. Much as biological evolution keeps viruses renewed and infectious, so too does memetic evolution keep certain beliefs current and contagious. It all happens without plan, and it gives evolving thought contagions a profound influence on society.

A World of Barriers

To some, it can seem naïve, even stupid to find significance in people benignly resharing beliefs. In anyone's day to day and year to year experience, the competition between people usually matters more than the competition between beliefs. A palpable competition between important players also settles much of the month to month business of nations. Rivals often hesitate to share their ideas and react with distrust when others do it; and power plays typically call for withholding information, or imparting outright disinformation. Considering the enormous range of competitive social and economic situations, meme replication would seem stalled in a bevy of barriers. The extremely competitive reaches of academia and the big city might thereby afford the most obscured viewing of thought contagions.

Competition gets dirty, too, and people learn to be suspecious of each other. Mass beliefs can serve as tools of embezzlement, exploitation, and subjugation; Western history shows their perennial utility for political and military ends. Some would conclude that mass belief exists chiefly as a user-made tool, and seldom as a natural phenomenon. And among those who think this way, thought contagion faces added barriers as a natural phenomenon: even the truest believer finds preaching to the cynical tough. Those regarding mass beliefs as user-made tools thereby become "immune to infection." Amongst themselves, the cynical naturally have fewer chances to behold self-replicating memes.

Another social barrier to thought contagion, the credential system, provides a method of rejecting important kinds of belief transmission from the uncredentialed. Those holding a doctorate, professional license, or clergy post thereby gain more access to minds than those lacking such distinctions. People do make exceptions, since most are themselves uncredentialed. Yet highly credentialed individuals may apply credential systems more vigorously, limiting the acquisition of common thought contagions among their ranks. Moreover, less credentialed people can recognize the restrictive effects of credential systems well enough that they don't even try to impart beliefs to someone with impressive credentials. All of this helps restrict the circles in which specific thought contagions can travel.

Finally, maturing believers in almost any movement feel increasingly constrained from efforts to persuade others. Many who proselytized openly during young adulthood find that behavior too socially hazardous a decade later. They learn the more cautious approach of one-to-one persuasion at opportune moments, limited to people they know and select carefully. So thought contagions typically slow down and grow less conspicuous in maturing social circles.

All these barriers and slowdowns can certainly make replicator theory appear irrelevant to mass culture, and the inconspicuousness of replication events can make its actual relevance little-noticed by scholars. Yet meme replication need not proceed conspicuously to amass enormous host populations, and the barriers act mainly against proselytism after young adulthood.

A movement spreads quite rapidly if it doubles its population once per decade. While such a rate amounts to a thousandfold increase per century, the act of making one new convert seldom looks like the event-of-the-decade in anyone's life. The event can take up such a minuscule fraction of a decade's exertions that it commands little attention, even though hugely conspicuous movements grow when populations repeat those events by the millions. Given all the movement's other activities, an outside observer might completely overlook its ten-year retransmitting rate.

Yet fast-doubling movements typically gain most of their converts as the young persuade the young. In the Mormons, for example, believers within young age brackets can average several new converts per decade, while their elders average far fewer. Then, rather than "shedding the beliefs of youth" as outsiders might expect, most of the young converts remain Mormons into old age.

Although most people do stabilize their core beliefs before middle age, those aging youth converts eventually swell their ranks among older age brackets. This causes a rapid but delayed doubling of middle-aged Mormons, even though conversions remain sparse at that age.

To mature people witnessing the surge, it may appear that forty-year-olds are simply "becoming more Mormon" or "becoming more religious." No longer situated to scrutinize what belief does for its own replication, these observers may instead ask themselves why so many forty-year-olds are choosing Mormonism. Other observers, such as foreign social scientists, may never have lived among young natives, where they could watch and experience the proselytism firsthand. Viewed as outsiders by young locals, they would be spared the conversion attempt altogether.

As for the competitive barriers to proselytism, most believers can avoid them just by limiting their conversion efforts to people who consider them friends--or at least non-competitors. This does restrict their meme-spreading opportunities, but not severely enough to rule out the few young converts per decade needed for rapid proselytic growth.

If proselytizing the young circumvents a few social barriers to thought contagion, actually raising the young circumvents more. Wherever competition, cynicism, and maturity curtail a meme's proselytic spread, parental growth becomes more important. In the case of the Mormons, population growth in North America results from a combination of high birth rates and high conversion rates. Once again, the beliefs themselves play an important part in their own replication: Mormons believe that in giving birth, they are actually helping pre-mortals advance to a higher life and escape the danger of Hell. High birth rates thus take on the status of moral duty to fellow souls.

Some would argue that Joseph Smith was delusional; others would call him a great "inventor" who pursued his projects--accidents and all--not with beakers, but with beliefs. In any case, the Mormon movement he started now has a life of its own, a life carried in memetic replicators.

The barriers to thought contagion do play an important part, preventing most of them from doubling at such wild rates as once a year. Yet the fittest thought contagions have adapted well to a world of barriers, permitting them to gradually amass real power throughout the world

Thought contagions are beliefs that "program" for their own spreading--ultimately affecting whole societies. By their strong effects on how we live, such beliefs secure self-propagation by inducing evangelism, abundant childraising and dropout prevention. Ideas harnessing these human functions most effectively win out over weaker variants. Evolving like life forms, through evolution by natural selection, thought contagions vie for ever stronger influence in human lives. Thought contagions range from fast rumors to slowly spreading traditional religions. The practical implications extend to violence, racism, neo-fascism, religious strife, overpopulation, street gangs, financial markets, Y2K myths, apocalyptic religion, fad diets, child raising, how children's games spread, abortion clashes, sexual politics, gay bashing, war, terrorism, AIDS, drug policy, recursive marketing, and many other areas.

Brief Example: Consider the belief that you need to find a romantic partner of a "compatible" astrological sign. This idea causes singles who have it to raise the subject of astrological sign compatibility with each new potential partner, in order to determine compatibility. So the idea exploits human mating drives to get itself copied into more minds. It is a "sexually transmitted belief," implicitly telling some hosts to send several copies of this idea to potential partners before accepting anyone for further dating. That includes people moved to spread the idea without though they do not hold winning converts as an objective. Resembling a paperless chain letter in some ways, the thought contagion also behaves in humans much as a computer virus behaves in computers. Though it does not erase its hosts’ memory, it can make it harder to find a partner deemed "compatible" by arbitrarily narrowing the field. So like a sexually transmitted microorganism, astrology ideas use human mating for their own reproduction. Even in couples who are not serious enough about astrology to promptly stop dating over an "incompatibility" finding, the astrological idea may still plant a seed of doubt that can favor giving up in the face of real relationship challenges when they arise. If the number of persuadable unbelievers in astrological dating is still high enough, the astrological idea can "win" by causing couples to break up: breakups move people back to dating--and back to discussing astrology with new people. There is thus an evolutionary conflict between the astrological belief and the genes of its host, and this conflict changes with changing prevalence of the idea and those susceptible to it. If, for instance, susceptible non-hosts of the belief become quite rare, then variants of the belief might "win" by reducing breakups and favoring more parent to child idea transmission. (A continued supply of young people reaching dating age without learning astrological dating beliefs from their parents probably stops this from happening, especially if many parents drop the idea by the time their children grow up.) This is not all that the new theory has to say about astrology, and astrology is not a special case. Similar analyses shed fresh light on a vast range of ancient religions and recent ideologies.

Old or New? Analogies between cultural evolution and biological evolution have been around for over a century, as have comparisons between contagious ideas and contagious microorganisms. William James, for instance, published an 1880 essay comparing cultural and biological evolution, while Gustave Le Bon discussed contagion of ideas in his 1895 book The Crowd. Thought contagion theory does not merely continue these lines of work with new topics, but incorporates a new approach as well: the evolutionary epidemiology of ideas. In connection to microorganisms, the field of evolutionary epidemiology was called "an emerging discipline" by biologist Paul Ewald in his 1994 book, Evolution of Infectious Disease (Oxford University Press)--see also Ewald's "The Evolution of Virulence," Scientific American, April 1993. This theory is not simply contagion, nor simply evolution, nor even contagion plus evolution. Rather, it is evolution happening through distinctly epidemiological mechanisms and dynamics. Thought contagion theory considers the evolutionary epidemiology not of biological germs, but of ideas. It does so in a neutral context: much as there can be harmful or beneficial infectious organisms, so too can there be harmful or beneficial infectious ideas--and many intermediate possibilities. As it happens, the first draft of Thought Contagion was finished in 1993, and earlier work was also done without using Ewald's work as a source of metaphor. Yet even if evolutionary thought contagion theory were a metaphor (which it is not, as noted below), it would have to be a metaphor to a newly emerging biological discipline. The book Thought Contagion also opens a new branch in the Library of Congress catalog system called "Contagion (Social Psychology)." (Because of its semi-popular reading level, Thought Contagion only uses the term "epidemiology" 6 times, though it uses the term "evolutionary" more often. Readers can appreciate the newness of its material without knowing technical words, but academic works in thought contagion science mention "evolutionary epidemiology" more often.) Works featured on these pages focus on the truly recursive evolutionary aspects of mass social phenomena, rather than simply jargonizing established fields such as psychology, sociology, Machiavellian theory, marketing science, etc. with new buzzwords. Readers of both the popular and scholarly works will often notice the "ordinary" question of how people acquire ideas turned on its head, by opening the likewise legitimate question of how ideas acquire people.

Isn't this the evolutionary replicator theory of culture invented by Richard Dawkins? No. Evolutionary replicator theory of culture was not invented by Richard Dawkins, but goes back at least to anthropologist F. T. Cloak, who discussed it in his 1973 paper "Elementary Self-Replicating Instructions and Their Works: Toward a Radical Reconstruction of General Anthropology Through a General Theory of Natural Selection" presented at the Ninth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. (In Cloak's very broad usage, genes also count as "instructions," hence the generality of the theory of natural selection presented in that paper.) The idea of Dawkins as originator of evolutionary cultural replicator theory has become so widespread and often communicated (due to Dawkins's popular writing style, ongoing publicity, etc., and Cloak's technical style, obscure modes of publication, and lack of self-promotion) that even people who have read Cloak's early papers and forgotten their publication dates can acquire the idea of crediting the theory's origin to Dawkins.
Cloak, who was never a popularizer, was praised by former American Psychological Association president Donald Campbell as "...one of the most meticulous and creative thinkers about social evolution..." (American Psychologist 31, p. 381, 1976). A 1975 paper by Cloak titled "Is a Cultural Ethology Possible" [Human Ecology 3(3): 161-182] that goes into less detail than the 1973 paper has been more widely cited--partly because of where it was published but perhaps also because a 1968 version by the same title was published in Research Reviews 15(1): 37-47.  The 1975 paper, which was cited by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976), does discuss the self-replication and natural selection of brain-stored cultural items, as well as elementary self-replicating instructions in general. But it does not handle these subjects as formally and symbolically as the 1973 paper. Instead, Cloak's 1975 paper refers readers to the 1973 paper for elaboration of the theory. Both works follow the cultural microevolution studies conducted in a village of Trinidad during 1963 to 1965 that were the basis of Cloak's 1966 Ph.D dissertation, and clearly are not products of "armchair theorizing." Early discussion of provisionally proposed "units of cultural instruction" and their self-propagating effects also appears in Cloak's short 1966 paper "Cultural Microevolution," [Research Previews 13: (2) p. 7-10.] The present evolutionary epidemiology of ideas, as a form of evolutionary cultural replicator theory, can be seen as further development of certain aspects of Cloak's work after some independent reinvention. It provides numerous examples of evolutionary replicator analysis giving distinct new insights for large societies, with emphasis on the practical significance of the theory in large societies. It does not, however, offer to explain all social or cultural phenomena nor even all cultural evolution and transmission phenomena.
As for the the word "replicator," it is documented in the Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, as going back to the early 1960s in connection with biology and the more general meaning of "that which replicates." No mention is made of Dawkins as the source of the word "replicator." While Dawkins did not originate evolutionary replicator theory or the word "replicator," he did originate the word "meme" with this particular English spelling and gave some examples in his 13-page chapter "Memes: The New Replicators." That, however, does not mean that Dawkins should be credited with Cloak's evolutionary cultural replicator work any more than the originator of the word "gene" (Johannsen) should be credited with launching Mendelian genetics. Unfortunately, Dawkins did not give the word "meme" a formal definition in 1976, leading to a profusion of definitions being made by people trying to fill the void. Dawkins did clarify in his 1982 book The Extended Phenotype (W. H. Freeman and Company) that "a meme should be regarded as a unit of information residing in a brain (Cloak's 'i-culture')" [p. 109], but this may have conveyed the impression of an Oxford professor fumbling for a definition and thus needing more help in the form of additional proposed definitions--adding to the profusion of definitions.
In recent works, Dawkins has strongly promoted philosopher Daniel Dennett, who uses a far less specific definition of meme--while neither of them even mention Cloak in connection with memes. Writing in his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Simon and Schuster, 1995), Dennett treats meme theory as merely a perspective (as distinct from a scientific hypothesis or theoretical framework), and expresses doubts for the prospects that it might become a rigorous science. Dennett sums up the perspective he calls "the meme perspective" with the slogan: "A scholar is just a library's way of making another library." This slogan, the expression of meme theory as a perspective, and much other material were also used in an October 27, 1989 lecture called "Memes and the Exploitation of the Imagination," republished in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48:2, Spring 1990, p. 127-135. That journal may have been a good place for reviewing aesthetic or artistic perspectives, but was not a peer-reviewed science journal whose reviewers could be expected to have read even popular works on evolutionary cultural replicator theory. While the slogan expresses the inverted and counter-intuitive thinking that often arises in evolutionary cultural replicator theory, it departs radically from the clarification of the term "meme" given by Dawkins in 1982. Dennett also treats artifacts such as spoked wheels as being or containing memes. In going along with this usage and publicly endorsing it, Dawkins implicitly abandons his 1982 definition in favor of a far less specific and more ambiguous definition for which the prospects of rigorous science may indeed be doubtful. A pithy slogan thus seems to have played a larger role in the definition change than any theoretical or empirical developments of science. In contrast Dawkins, whose professional interests lie more heavily in genetics, has not promoted any work that treats genetics as a mere perspective. For instance, it seems unlikely that he would endorse a change of definition for the word gene even if someone popularized the provocative slogan, "An amino acid is just a prion's way of making another prion."
As a reader of draft chapters from Dennett's 1995 book, Dawkins might have persuaded Dennett to recognize Cloak as originator and elaborator of evolutionary cultural replicator theory, but apparently he did not. The writing style and non-mention of Cloak's 1973 paper by Dawkins's 1976 book can easily give readers the impression that the theory was invented along with the word by Dawkins, although Dawkins did say in his 1982 book that he did not know the human culture literature well enough to authoritatively contribute to it (p. 112). Fortunately, the authoritative contribution of the theory by Cloak did in fact come from a human culture specialist: a cultural anthropologist. In both his 1989 lecture and his 1995 book, Dennett includes a paragraph (1995, p. 361) indicating that Dawkins was describing the "extension of classical Darwinian theory" (to cultural replicators) as "his" [Dawkins's] innovation -- even though Dawkins cites Cloak's 1975 paper, which in turn refers readers to Cloak's more technical 1973 paper for elaboration of the theory. Misattribution of the theory to Dawkins, along with Dawkins's subsequent promotion and endorsement of works containing that misattribution, have helped to widely disseminate the misattribution. Having Dawkins incorrectly credited with launching evolutionary cultural replicator theory may have vastly increased the weight given to his implied approval of a nonscientifically-based drastic change in the definition of the word "meme."
In 1997, The Oxford English Dictionary apparently took note of both the early profusion of definitions and the recent shifting of definitions to come up with a very broad definition for meme. By that usage, some thought contagions are "memes," some thought contagions are not memes; some "memes" are thought contagions, and some "memes" are not thought contagions.
With sharp differences between different dictionaries and among "memeticists," meme has gone from its early specificity to a word looking for a definition--and a retinue of derivatives that seem to have been created mainly because they could be created. Although the word was coined to popularize a specific theoretical paradigm, that fact seems to have been forgotten as people eventually began devising theoretical paradigms to go with the word rather than words to go with their theoretical paradigms--perhaps due to the word's versatility and popularity. (Word versatility and popularity are, of course, not scientific criteria for forming and testing theoretical frameworks.) This situation may give the false impression that the word and its similarity to the word gene were the impetus for the original theoretical paradigm. It also creates a state of academic, scientific, and terminological gridlock that may impede application of the original theoretical framework, thus serving various interest groups including those who want only alternative theoretical frameworks (strict sociobiology, hard-line behaviorism, etc.) to be used. These difficulties favor the use of more specific, self-explanatory, and unequivocal terms such as "idea," "belief," "behavior," "artifact," and "thought contagion," "doctrine," "opinion," "belief system," "urban legend," and so forth--some of which are widely accepted even without the versatility of a monosyllable. The difficulties with meme starting in the 1990s call for new caution against confusing thought contagion theory with various theories of "memes." Accordingly, some very recent works avoid the confusion by not even using the word "meme" -- except in reference to literature that does use the word. However, the ambiguity of a word with many definitions swirling around it can actually increase its popular propagation, even as some scientists recoil from it. When people are able to read into a word the meaning that most suits them, it may increase the number of non-specialists adopting and using the term.