Reading Response 3 - Caleb Haydock

“We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”

Genes are what make us, shape us, and construct our physical presence.  Each person is made up of thousands of genes, but where do they come from?  As described in Richard Dawkins’ book, Genes are replicators that get past down from parents, grandparents and so forth.  Genes relate to the physical body, and the passing down from body to body.  Genes are finite; as they replicate they begin to deteriorate where someone might only have a couple of the same exact genes from their grandparents.  In comparison, Dawkins establishes “memes” as of relating to the intangible. They deal with ideas being exchanged from brain to brain.  According Dawkins, memes are replicators of culture as opposed to replicators of physical traits.  To me memes are at their core ideas, whether original, altered, or both.  Since we are dealing with cultural changes, I am weary of using genetics as a rubric.  For culture not concrete at all and therefore harder to pinpoint/label.  This, in my opinion, is why memes also have to be relative; where an idea can be broken into components.  As Dawkins explains, if a group of individuals agree with one component but not the other, they are to be recognized as separate memes.  Likewise, if a group agrees with both and they are “closely linked” then they are to be considered one meme to that group (196).   This idea of memes is very important when talking about art in convergent media.  For any idea or work (ie. A video) can be broken down in components and then restructured to create a meme of the original work.  Ideas are constantly being re-evaluated and re-used to create new ideas.  With newer ideas, people are given more tools to create these ideas, which are making “memes” more prevalent.  To me however, memes are more dependent on the perception of the original idea than anything else.  

Here is a link to a forum which brings up an experiment dealing with perception: http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=172140

( just The first three posts, especially the third one)

To further discuss this, I ask you to look at the quote I put up above.  If I asked everyone to right a paper on this quote, according to Dawkins, we would have several different memes created.  I absolutely agree but I think that it goes further than that.   Everyone who reads the quote, or any idea for that matter, immediately has allowed that idea to affect their brain in one way or another.  So there could be an argument saying that certain actions taken by an individual after initial exposure to an idea are also memes.  Memes, like Genes, are always going to exist as a structure to the flow of ideas.  Unlike genes, memes can be everlasting making an imprint on or culture forever.