Meme Too

In reading the Vancouver Sun this morning, I ran across an opinion piece, written by a fellow who was concerned about the broadly-shared misconception that an aging population is or will drive massive increases in health care spending.

In making his argument, he raised the notion of memes, an idea about which I had previously never heard.

While his arguments about misconceptions about health care expenditures was interesting enough, it was the notion of meme that immediately hooked my attention.

The following is a Wikipedia definition of meme:

• memes refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator of a certain idea or a complex of ideas.... People could view many cultural entities as capable of such replication, generally through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient (although not perfect) copiers of information and behaviour. Memes are not always copied perfectly, and might indeed become refined, combined or otherwise modified with other ideas, resulting in new memes, which may themselves prove more, or less, efficient replicators than their predecessors, thus providing a framework for a hypothesis of cultural evolution, analogous to the theory of biological evolution based on genes.

My immediate reaction to reading this definition was to see within it parallels between the notion of meme and the mathematical notion of fractal.

The Wikipedia definition of fractal is:

• fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole, a property called self-similarity.... There are several examples of fractals, which are defined as portraying exact self-similarity, quasi self-similarity, or statistical self-similarity. While fractals are a mathematical construct, they are found in nature....

The notions of fractal and meme are not the same, but certainly the ideas of being self-replicating, self-similar and perhaps infinitely complex, are characteristics which run through both concepts.

And it seems to me, on first blush, that memes may be fractal, or at least have fractal qualities.  A quick Google search of the two terms together shows me that I am not the first person to link the ideas.  Indeed, since the idea of meme (a meme in its own right) apparently can easily be traced back to the early part of the 20th century, I feel like a really late comer to this notion.

I find this ignorance on my part particularly galling, as I have invested the last thirty years or so of my life in the role of meme creator and paid, intentional meme replicator -- an educator.

I need to do more reading.........