Talk:Memetics

Counter-criticism sources?

It seems to me that part of the criticism sections suffers somewhat in that the counter-criticism arguments are written as though made by the writer, rather than referencing who claims it. Specifically, I'm talking about this section:

"This, however, has been demonstrated (e.g. by Daniel C. Dennett, in Darwin's Dangerous Idea) to not be the case, in fact, due to the existence of self-regulating correction mechanisms (vaguely resembling those of gene transcription) enabled by the redundancy and other properties of most meme expression languages, which do stabilize information transfer. (E.g. spiritual narratives—including music and dance forms—can survive in full detail across any number of generations even in cultures with oral tradition only.) Memes for which stable copying methods are available will inevitably get selected for survival more often than those which can only have unstable mutations, therefore going extinct. (Notably, Benitez-Bribiesca's claim of "no code script" is also irrelevant, considering the fact that there is nothing preventing the information contents of memes from being coded, encoded, expressed, preserved or copied in all sorts of different ways throughout their life-cycles.)"

For example, here it seems that the article writer claims that a piece of criticism is irrelevant, rather than stating that proponents have claimed it's irrelevant, with links as to who these proponents are. I've been away from wikipedia for a long time, so I'm not sure on the guidelines (and don't dare change anything), but it seems similar to original research [[1]]. 83.209.122.143 (talk) 10:49, 26 June 2017 (UTC)

Agreed. I've added a POV-check. The nexus of the problem is one of tone. Even if there were references citing the counter-criticisms, the way it's presented precludes the neutral point of view of an encyclopedia entry on the subject. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.21.245.213 (talk) 23:05, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

Indeed. It reads like original research WP:OR to me. Dr.khatmando (talk) 16:27, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Agreed. To claim that memetics is a failed paradigm seems exaggerated since it is now more relevant than ever for studying the proliferation of true and false memes on social media. Terms like meme and go viral have become part of everyday language, and viral marketing is a big thing. Possible references: [[2]], [[3]], [[4]]. Agnerf (talk) 12:22, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

A lot of pseudoscience have also become part of everyday language, like hysteria, Freudian slip, and ego. It's not a valid argument. Proliferation of false information does not prove that treating information as meme is a good paradigm. Two of your refs are written 10 years ago when memetics was in a better state, the other is broken link. --C9mVio9JRy (talk) 18:35, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Particle Memetics

Has anyone heard of 'particle memetics'? Eschewing the gene analogy this theory takes an approach based on particle physics. It's an interesting idea which also pulls in ideas from other areas of physics such as quantum theory. Only I've not found much information on the web about it.

Reluctant to get involved

I am somewhat of an expert on the subject, first article on memes was in 1985. However, given the way experts are treated, usually being reverted, I am reluctant to spend the effort.

I could do a draft and send it to someone to post if anyone wants to let me avoid credit. Keith Henson (talk) 16:46, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

Undue weight to Chvaja 2020 in lede

While this is RS relevant to the article topic, it should be in a criticism or comparison section. The article itself is only been cited 5 times. Perspectives on Science is good but not spectacular as a journal (CiteScore is 1.2 and is 78 percentile). Chvaja 2020’s title and framing is also somewhat clickbaity. While it’s implying memetics failed in the sense of not being comparatively popular in academia, the argument it seems to be making is not necessarily that memetics is epistemically wrong but rather that scientists in the gene-culture coevolution theory lineage do more hypothesis testing and have less a priori assumptions. This is a state claim, not a trait claim. Nothing about memetics research would preclude hypothesis testing. It’s also a bit of a polemic where one is not necessary as the memetics section in the DIT article points out there is much overlap and the biggest difference may be the the lineages of the researchers. Finally, Chvaja 2020 invents a race and a finish line on its own. Something has “failed” if it’s not as popular as something similar with a certain group of people at a certain time (of which the group and the time frame is the author’s discretion)? Is everyone who wasn’t the most popular kid in their high school senior class a “failure?” This is a debater’s tactic that we should put aside. - Scarpy (talk) 06:30, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

It was only published 2 years ago when you counted 5 citations, and now it has 13. For a paper in the philosophy of science I think that's a reasonable amount. I'm in the field of cultural evolution and my observation is that the field of memetics is indeed dead. Sure, there's always one grad student from physics or math publishing something with the word "meme" at the conferences, but one person is not an academic field. It's true that the difference with DIT may simply be the researchers' lineages, but if all of the researchers that are now studying memetics don't refer to it as memetics, a wikipedia article framing it as memetics would not make sense. --C9mVio9JRy (talk) 18:51, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Please correct bibliography

Mikael Sandberg i the author of "The Evolution of IT Innovations in Swedish Organizations: A Darwinian Critique of ‘Lamarckian’ Institutional Economics", Journal of Evolutionary Economics, vol. 17, No. 1 (Feb 2007). Please correct. See Swedish wikipedia for more publication of his. 85.224.150.43 (talk) 13:39, 28 December 2023 (UTC)