Editing Meme (section)

== Memes as discrete units ==

Dawkins initially defined ''meme'' as a noun that "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of ''imitation''".<ref name="selfish"/> John S. Wilkins retained the notion of meme as a kernel of cultural imitation while emphasizing the meme's evolutionary aspect, defining the meme as "the least unit of sociocultural information relative to a selection process that has favorable or unfavorable selection bias that exceeds its endogenous tendency to change".<ref name="wilkins">
{{cite journal |last=Wilkins |first=John S. |title=What's in a Meme? Reflections from the perspective of the history and philosophy of evolutionary biology |journal=Journal of Memetics |date=1998 |volume=2 |url=http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/ |access-date=13 December 2008 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091201161123/http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/ |archive-date=1 December 2009}}
</ref> The meme as a unit provides a convenient means of discussing "a piece of thought copied from person to person", regardless of whether that thought contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme. A meme could consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech in which that word first occurred. This forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a single unit of self-replicating information found on the self-replicating [[chromosome]].

While the identification of memes as "units" conveys their nature to replicate as discrete, indivisible entities, it does not imply that thoughts somehow become [[Quantization (physics)|quantized]] or that "[[atom]]ic" ideas exist that cannot be dissected into smaller pieces. A meme has no given size. [[Susan Blackmore]] writes that melodies from [[Ludwig van Beethoven|Beethoven]]'s symphonies are commonly used to illustrate the difficulty involved in delimiting memes as discrete units. She notes that while the first four notes of [[Symphony No. 5 (Beethoven)|Beethoven's Fifth Symphony]] ({{Audio|Beet5mov1bars1to5.ogg|listen}}) form a meme widely replicated as an independent unit, one can regard the entire symphony as a single meme as well.<ref name="machine"/>

The inability to pin an idea or cultural feature to quantifiable key units is widely acknowledged as a problem for memetics. It has been argued however that the traces of memetic processing can be quantified utilizing neuroimaging techniques which measure changes in the "connectivity profiles between brain regions".<ref name="mcnamara"/> Blackmore meets such criticism by stating that memes compare with genes in this respect: that while a [[gene]] has no particular size, nor can we ascribe every [[phenotype|phenotypic]] feature directly to a particular gene, it has value because it encapsulates that key unit of inherited expression subject to evolutionary pressures. To illustrate, she notes evolution selects for the gene for features such as eye color; it does not select for the individual nucleotide in a strand of [[DNA]]. Memes play a comparable role in understanding the evolution of imitated behaviors.<ref name="machine"/>

''Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process'' (1981) by [[Charles J. Lumsden]] and [[E. O. Wilson]] proposes the theory that genes and culture co-evolve, and that the fundamental biological units of culture must correspond to neuronal networks that function as nodes of semantic [[memory]]. Lumsden and Wilson coined their own word, ''[[culturgen]]'', which did not catch on. Coauthor Wilson later acknowledged the term ''meme'' as the best label for the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance in his 1998 book ''[[Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge]]'', which elaborates upon the fundamental role of memes in unifying the [[Natural science|natural]] and [[social sciences]].<ref>{{harvnb|Wilson|1998}}</ref>

At present, the existence of discrete cultural units which satisfy memetic theory has been challenged in a variety of ways. What is critical from this perspective is that in denying memetics unitary status is to deny a particularly fundamental part of Dawkins' original argument. In particular, denying memes are a unit, or are explainable in some clear unitary structure denies the cultural analogy that inspired Dawkins to define them. If memes are not describable as unitary, memes are not accountable within a neo-Darwinian model of evolutionary culture.

Within cultural anthropology, materialist approaches are skeptical of such units. In particular, [[Dan Sperber]] argues that memes are not unitary in the sense that there are no two instances of exactly the same cultural idea, all that can be argued is that there is material mimicry of an idea. Thus every instance of a "meme" would not be a true evolutionary unit of replication.<ref>{{Cite book |first=Dan |last=Sperber |url=http://worldcat.org/oclc/247213620 |title=Explaining culture : a naturalistic approach |date=1998 |publisher=Blackwell Publ |isbn=0631200452 |oclc=247213620 |access-date=23 January 2023 |archive-date=17 March 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230317201257/https://worldcat.org/title/247213620 |url-status=live}}</ref>

Dan Deacon,<ref>{{cite book |last=Deacon |first=Terrence W. |chapter=Memes as Signs in the Dynamic Logic of Semiosis: Beyond Molecular Science and Computation Theory |title=Conceptual Structures at Work |date=2004 |chapter-url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-27769-9_2 |series="Lecture Notes in Computer Science" series, no. 3127 |volume=3127 |pages=17–30 |place=Berlin / Heidelberg |publisher=Springer |doi=10.1007/978-3-540-27769-9_2 |isbn=9783540223924 |access-date=17 March 2023 |archive-date=17 March 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230317201237/https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-27769-9_2 |url-status=live}}</ref> [[Kalevi Kull]]<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Kull |first=Kalevi |date=2000 |title=Copy versus translate, meme versus sign: Development of Biological Textuality |url=http://www.zbi.ee/~kalevi/copytr.htm |journal=European Journal for Semiotic Studies |volume=12 |issue=1 |pages=101–120 |access-date=23 January 2023  |archive-date=23 January 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230123063112/http://www.zbi.ee/~kalevi/copytr.htm |url-status=live}}</ref> separately argued memes are degenerate [[Sign (semiotics)|Signs]] in that they offer only a partial explanation of the triadic in [[Charles Sanders Peirce|Charles Sanders Peirce's]] semiotic theory: a sign (a reference to an object), an object (the thing being referred to), and an interpretant (the interpreting actor of a sign). They argue the meme unit is a sign which only is defined by its replication ability. Accordingly, in the broadest sense, the objects of copying are memes, whereas the objects of translation and interpretation are signs. Later, Sara Cannizzaro more fully develops out this semiotic relation in order to reframe memes as being a kind of semiotic activity, however she too denies that memes are units, referring to them as "sign systems" instead.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Cannizzaro |first=Sara |date=31 December 2016 |title=Internet memes as internet signs: A semiotic view of digital culture |url=http://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/sss/article/view/SSS.2016.44.4.05 |journal=Sign Systems Studies |volume=44 |issue=4 |pages=562–586 |doi=10.12697/SSS.2016.44.4.05 |s2cid=53374867 |issn=1736-7409 |access-date=23 January 2023  |archive-date=1 February 2023  |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230201012712/https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/sss/article/view/SSS.2016.44.4.05 |url-status=live |doi-access=free}}</ref>

In Limor Shifman's account of Internet memetics, she also denies memetics as being unitary.<ref name=":0" /> She argues memes are not unitary, however many assume they are because many previous memetic researchers confounded memes with the cultural interest in "virals": singular informational objects which spread with a particular rate and veracity such as a video or a picture.<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Nahon |first1=Karine |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/849213692 |title=Going viral |last2=Hemsley |first2=Jeff |publisher=Polity Press |date=2013 |isbn=9780745671284 |location=Cambridge, England |oclc=849213692 |access-date=23 January 2023  |archive-date=17 March 2023  |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230317201244/https://www.worldcat.org/title/849213692 |url-status=live}}</ref> As such, Shifman argues that Dawkins' original notion of meme is closer to what communication and information studies consider digitally viral replication.