Does the idea of meme make sense?

Introduction

The Selfish Gene: the biological basis of our behavior (The Selfish Gene in English) is an informative book on the theory of evolution, written by Richard Dawkins in 1976. It interprets the evolution of species from the standpoint of genetic and individual or racial.

Definitely biology is flooding all fields of human knowledge, a phenomenon that can not escape the social sciences or humanities. In sociology, anthropology, psychology and pedagogy, the first disciplines that permeated the scientific tsunami - powerful waves with genetics and evolution - now add up all the processes of human communication.

It was the genius of one of the most prestigious contemporary biologists in research on the implication of genes in the replication of life, Richard Dawkins, British zoologist, who thirty years ago presented his hypothesis about the biological replication of culture, information identifying the unit with the name "meme". Its initial purpose was to define memes as cultural particles in the form of ideas, tunes, jokes, idioms, news, poems, prayers, rules of etiquette, and others could replicate when people exchange information, similar to viral infection. They are the "genes of thought" that operate inside our heads. "We should consider memes as living structures, not metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, my brain literally parasites, making it a vehicle of spreading the meme, in the same way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.

Discussion and Analysis

This initial idea, the meme meme on, aroused a strong research career to prove or disprove that cultural exchange is held in the biological replication of information. Controversies and progress has been remarkable and numerous. The first, trying to contain the heavy foot of the imposing elephant science and evidence amoral cold and dry the roots that nourish the proud notion of intellectual superiority which is the cradle of free will, the last bastion differential saying only living possess. The second, designing and building cutting-edge technologies such as PET (Positron emition tomography), which projects three-dimensional images of brain function in a conscious state, the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) that allows to map live network connections neuronal brain, magnetoencephalography, which measures magnetic fields produced by electrical activity in the brain, including to endorse the hypothesis experimentally dawkiniana.

At first, taking literally the definition of the zoo, many do not worry too much this line of research, because with certain simplicity inferred that meme was finally nothing but a new baptism for the concept of idea (how Plato would have suffered listen so great comparison!), ie, image or mental representation that lives in our brains and we express through the language. We will see, by running the contents of this text, that this statement is to compare the electricity with a vial (Dennett, 127).

But it was the quality, reliability, and especially the prestige of this revolutionary who joined raid of evolutionary biology, which eventually demarcate an area of scientific seriousness to the world of memetics. The distinguished ...