MEMETICS; THE NASCENT SCIENCE OF IDEAS AND THEIR TRANSMISSION

By J. Peter Vajk

In April 1917, a 47-year old lawyer-turned-journalist and a handful of companions enter Russia by train. By November, they take control of the government of Russia. Within another four years, a devastating civil war kills some 10 million Russians.
In 1924, a 34-year old handyman and would-be artist and architect is arrested for starting a brawl in a tavern in southern Germany. In jail over the next nine months, he writes a book expressing his dissatisfactions with life and the world in which he lives, and lays out a blueprint of what he plans to do to change it. Within nine years he has total and sole control of the entire national government. Over the ensuing thirteen years, his exercise of that power leads to the deaths of some thirty million people across two continents and three seas.
In the early 1970's, two young men, both of them Vietnam War veterans, go camping in the Sierra Nevada in California, about a mile from a Girl Scout campground. The second afternoon of their stay, one of the men breaks out in chills, sweats, and violent shivering, like he had experienced a few times in Vietnam. About a week later, in the San Francisco Bay area, six Girl Scouts become ill, with high fevers, severe headaches, and violent shivering.

In the mid-1970's, a charismatic minister attracts a large following among the poor and disaffected population of a Northern California urban center. After their activities draw increasing attention from the press, the minister and nearly a thousand of his adherent move en masse to an obscure village in the jungles of a small South American country. By November 1978, he and 910 others, including children, lie dead in the jungle, having drunk KoolAid which they knew was laced with cyanide.
In the late 1970's, a handsome young French Canadian steward working for Air Canada begins to make regular visits (using his free airline passes) to New York's Greenwich Village, Los Angeles' Sunset Strip, and San Francisco's Castro, Polk, and Mission Street areas. He has no trouble picking up dates with dozens of gay men over a period of two or three years. By 1980, over a hundred men from coast to coast are dead of dying >from a strange form of cancer or from a rare form of pneumonia.
In the fall, of 1988, a graduate student loads a short program into a few mainframe computers. Within two days, dozens of mainframe computers all across North America and Great Britain come to a halt: each computer is repetitively doing nonsense copying of files, leaving no time at all for productive computing. It takes as much as a week to get some of the computer centers back to normal activity.

These six episodes, from the disparate fields of politics, human disease, religion, and computer technology, have a great deal in common. It is my aim tonight to explore memetics, a science in the early stages of birth. "Meme" (pronounced to rhyme with "cream") is a neologism, coined by analogy to "gene," by the writer-zoologist Richard Dawkins in his book _The Selfish Gene_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). By the end of this essay, the deep similarities (as well as some of the vital differences) among these six episodes will, I hope, become clear. I will also engage in some speculation about the implications of this nascent science for current affairs.