That’s the 2014 annual question posted on the website edge.org. (Previous Edge questions include “What is your dangerous idea?” (2006) and “What questions are you asking yourself?” (1998).) As we explain in our post of 8.31.14, we would retire Richard Dawkins’s evolutionary theory of memes.
What?
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What does the meme get replaced with?
That’s the $64 Question! To answer this question, I would need a decent working definition of memes, yet one of my objections to the concept of memes is the lack of a precise definition of what a “meme” is!
P.S.: how would you define memes?
Meme = a thought pattern.
Okay, fair enough … but now … define what a “thought pattern” is !!! In other words, just as Dwakins correctly describes the “unit of selection” problem in the first chapter of The Selfish Gene—i.e., does natural selection operate at the level of the species, at the level of the group, at the level of the individual organism, or at the level of the gene?–by the same token, if we are going to posit an evolutionary theory of memes or ideas, then we need to know what the proper level or unit of a thought pattern is. (Personally, I haven’t found (thus far) a sufficiently precise definition of “memes” on which to build an evolutionary theory of culture or ideas.)