192-443: A meme ( / m iː m / ; MEEM ) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with
384-484: A concept , reasoning that concepts are not restricted to an individual or a generation, may persist for long periods of time, and may evolve. Opinions differ as to how best to apply the concept of memes within a "proper" disciplinary framework. One view sees memes as providing a useful philosophical perspective with which to examine cultural evolution . Proponents of this view (such as Susan Blackmore and Daniel Dennett ) argue that considering cultural developments from
576-452: A monoculture in a social group can bear risks, just as a single species can wither in the face of environmental change, for lack of functional responses to the change. Thus in military culture, valor is counted a typical behavior for an individual and duty, honor, and loyalty to the social group are counted as virtues or functional responses in the continuum of conflict . In the practice of religion, analogous attributes can be identified in
768-408: A book or a musical score . Adam McNamara has suggested that memes can be thereby classified as either internal or external memes (i-memes or e-memes). Some commentators have likened the transmission of memes to the spread of contagions . Social contagions such as fads , hysteria , copycat crime , and copycat suicide exemplify memes seen as the contagious imitation of ideas. Observers distinguish
960-494: A case in point. In one set of experiments he asked religious people to write down on a piece of paper the meanings of the Ten Commandments . Despite the subjects' own expectations of consensus, interpretations of the commandments showed wide ranges of variation, with little evidence of consensus. In another experiment, subjects with autism and subjects without autism interpreted ideological and religious sayings (for example, "Let
1152-552: A certain culture may develop unique designs and methods of tool -making that give it a competitive advantage over another culture. Each tool-design thus acts somewhat similarly to a biological gene in that some populations have it and others do not, and the meme's function directly affects the presence of the design in future generations. In keeping with the thesis that in evolution one can regard organisms simply as suitable "hosts" for reproducing genes, Dawkins argues that one can view people as "hosts" for replicating memes. Consequently,
1344-425: A consistent, rigorous, and precise understanding of what typically makes up one unit of cultural transmission remains a problem in debates about memetics . In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA . Meme transmission requires a physical medium, such as photons, sound waves, touch, taste, or smell because memes can be transmitted only through
1536-406: A culture with an abacus are trained with distinctive reasoning style. Cultural lenses may also make people view the same outcome of events differently. Westerners are more motivated by their successes than their failures, while East Asians are better motivated by the avoidance of failure. Culture is important for psychologists to consider when understanding the human mental operation. The notion of
1728-409: A detailed account for Darwin, a letter which does not survive; however, a letter to his friend Frederick Daniel Dyster does survive with an account just three months after the event. One effect of the debate was to hugely increase Huxley's visibility amongst educated people, through the accounts in newspapers and periodicals. Another consequence was to alert him to the importance of public debate:
1920-437: A distinct worldview that is incommensurable with the worldviews of other groups. Although more inclusive than earlier views, this approach to culture still allowed for distinctions between "civilized" and "primitive" or "tribal" cultures. In 1860, Adolf Bastian (1826–1905) argued for "the psychic unity of mankind." He proposed that a scientific comparison of all human societies would reveal that distinct worldviews consisted of
2112-468: A full picture, but it does not provide an ultimate explanation ." There are a number of international agreements and national laws relating to the protection of cultural heritage and cultural diversity . UNESCO and its partner organizations such as Blue Shield International coordinate international protection and local implementation. The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in
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#17328592868882304-574: A group of people and expressed in their behavior but which does not exist as a physical object. Humanity is in a global "accelerating culture change period," driven by the expansion of international commerce, the mass media, and above all, the human population explosion, among other factors. Culture repositioning means the reconstruction of the cultural concept of a society. Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. These forces are related to both social structures and natural events, and are involved in
2496-476: A historical event should not be thought of as culture unless referring to the medium of television itself, which may have been selected culturally; however, schoolchildren watching television after school with their friends to "fit in" certainly qualifies since there is no grounded reason for one's participation in this practice. In the context of cultural studies, a text includes not only written language , but also films , photographs , fashion , or hairstyles :
2688-474: A hypothesis which was a good working basis. Logically speaking, the prior question was whether evolution had taken place at all. It is to this question that much of Darwin's On the Origin of Species was devoted. Its publication in 1859 completely convinced Huxley of evolution and it was this and no doubt his admiration of Darwin's way of amassing and using evidence that formed the basis of his support for Darwin in
2880-423: A kind of semiotic activity, however she too denies that memes are units, referring to them as "sign systems" instead. In Limor Shifman's account of Internet memetics, she also denies memetics as being unitary. 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
3072-438: A larger brain. The word is used in a general sense as the evolved ability to categorize and represent experiences with symbols and to act imaginatively and creatively. This ability arose with the evolution of behavioral modernity in humans around 50,000 years ago and is often thought to be unique to humans . However, some other species have demonstrated similar, though much less complicated, abilities for social learning. It
3264-649: 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 quantized or that " atomic " ideas exist that cannot be dissected into smaller pieces. A meme has no given size. Susan Blackmore writes that melodies from Beethoven 's symphonies are commonly used to illustrate
3456-416: A lesson he never forgot. A third effect was to serve notice that Darwinian ideas could not be easily dismissed: on the contrary, they would be vigorously defended against orthodox authority. A fourth effect was to promote professionalism in science, with its implied need for scientific education. A fifth consequence was indirect: as Wilberforce had feared, a defence of evolution did undermine literal belief in
3648-847: A limited concentration scoped on the intricacies of consumerism, which belongs to a wider culture sometimes referred to as Western civilization or globalism . From the 1970s onward, Stuart Hall's pioneering work, along with that of his colleagues Paul Willis , Dick Hebdige , Tony Jefferson, and Angela McRobbie , created an international intellectual movement. As the field developed, it began to combine political economy , communication , sociology , social theory , literary theory , media theory , film/video studies , cultural anthropology , philosophy , museum studies , and art history to study cultural phenomena or cultural texts. In this field researchers often concentrate on how particular phenomena relate to matters of ideology , nationality , ethnicity , social class , and/or gender . Cultural studies
3840-561: A manner analogous to that of biological evolution . Memes do this through processes analogous to those of variation , mutation , competition , and inheritance , each of which influences a meme's reproductive success. Memes spread through the behavior that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct , while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate. Memes that replicate most effectively enjoy more success, and some may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to
4032-738: A mechanism for solidifying group identity, valuable for a pack-hunting species whose individuals rely on cooperation to catch large and fast prey. Frequently the evolutionary preconception in terms of which such theories are framed is implicitly group-selectionist, but it is possible to rephrase the theories in terms of orthodox gene selection. He argued that the role of key replicator in cultural evolution belongs not to genes, but to memes replicating thought from person to person by means of imitation. These replicators respond to selective pressures that may or may not affect biological reproduction or survival. In her book The Meme Machine , Susan Blackmore regards religions as particularly tenacious memes. Many of
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#17328592868884224-406: A member of society." Alternatively, in a contemporary variant, "Culture is defined as a social domain that emphasizes the practices, discourses and material expressions, which, over time, express the continuities and discontinuities of social meaning of a life held in common. The Cambridge English Dictionary states that culture is "the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of
4416-414: A meme that shortens the longevity of its hosts will tend to disappear faster. However, as hosts are mortal, retention is not sufficient to perpetuate a meme in the long term; memes also need transmission. Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means). Memes can replicate vertically or horizontally within
4608-479: A meme's-eye view— as if memes themselves respond to pressure to maximise their own replication and survival—can lead to useful insights and yield valuable predictions into how culture develops over time. Others such as Bruce Edmonds and Robert Aunger have focused on the need to provide an empirical grounding for memetics to become a useful and respected scientific discipline . A third approach, described by Joseph Poulshock, as "radical memetics" seeks to place memes at
4800-425: A mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate , mutate, and respond to selective pressures . In popular language, a meme may refer to an Internet meme , typically an image, that is remixed, copied, and circulated in a shared cultural experience online. Proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in
4992-461: A modern context, meaning something similar, but no longer assuming that philosophy was man's natural perfection. His use, and that of many writers after him, " refers to all the ways in which human beings overcome their original barbarism , and through artifice, become fully human." In 1986, philosopher Edward S. Casey wrote, "The very word culture meant 'place tilled' in Middle English, and
5184-674: A nail, a skill that a learner imitates from watching a demonstration without necessarily imitating every discrete movement modeled by the teacher in the demonstration, stroke for stroke. Susan Blackmore distinguishes the difference between the two modes of inheritance in the evolution of memes, characterizing the Darwinian mode as "copying the instructions" and the Lamarckian as "copying the product". Clusters of memes, or memeplexes (also known as meme complexes or as memecomplexes ), such as cultural or political doctrines and systems, may also play
5376-518: A new approach to culture was suggested by Rein Raud , who defines culture as the sum of resources available to human beings for making sense of their world and proposes a two-tiered approach, combining the study of texts (all reified meanings in circulation) and cultural practices (all repeatable actions that involve the production, dissemination or transmission of purposes), thus making it possible to re-link anthropological and sociological study of culture with
5568-513: A nominal assistant-surgeon, so he might work on the specimens he collected and the observations he made during the voyage of the Rattlesnake . He solved the problem of Appendicularia , whose place in the animal kingdom Johannes Peter Müller had found himself wholly unable to assign. It and the Ascidians are both, as Huxley showed, tunicates , today regarded as a sister group to the vertebrates in
5760-645: A palaeontologist is marked by a rather strange predilection for 'persistent types', in which he seemed to argue that evolutionary advancement (in the sense of major new groups of animals and plants) was rare or absent in the Phanerozoic . In the same vein, he tended to push the origin of major groups such as birds and mammals back into the Palaeozoic era, and to claim that no order of plants had ever gone extinct. Much paper has been consumed by historians of science ruminating on this strange and somewhat unclear idea. Huxley
5952-588: A part in the acceptance of new memes. Memeplexes comprise groups of memes that replicate together and coadapt. Memes that fit within a successful memeplex may gain acceptance by "piggybacking" on the success of the memeplex. As an example, John D. Gottsch discusses the transmission, mutation and selection of religious memeplexes and the theistic memes contained. Theistic memes discussed include the "prohibition of aberrant sexual practices such as incest, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, castration, and religious prostitution", which may have increased vertical transmission of
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6144-428: A particular group of people at a particular time." Terror management theory posits that culture is a series of activities and worldviews that provide humans with the basis for perceiving themselves as "person[s] of worth within the world of meaning"—raising themselves above the merely physical aspects of existence, in order to deny the animal insignificance and death that Homo sapiens became aware of when they acquired
6336-407: A particular level of sophistication in the arts , sciences, education , or manners. The level of cultural sophistication has also sometimes been used to distinguish civilizations from less complex societies. Such hierarchical perspectives on culture are also found in class-based distinctions between a high culture of the social elite and a low culture , popular culture , or folk culture of
6528-503: A particular rate and veracity such as a video or a picture. As such, Shifman argues that Dawkins' original notion of meme is closer to what communication and information studies consider digitally viral replication. Dawkins noted the three conditions that must exist for evolution to occur: Dawkins emphasizes that the process of evolution naturally occurs whenever these conditions co-exist, and that evolution does not apply only to organic elements such as genes. He regards memes as also having
6720-432: A person to make sense of the culture they inhabit, "can blind us to things outsiders pick up immediately." The sociology of culture concerns culture as manifested in society . For sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918), culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history." As such, culture in the sociological field can be defined as
6912-431: A result, there has been a recent influx of quantitative sociologists to the field. Thus, there is now a growing group of sociologists of culture who are, confusingly, not cultural sociologists. These scholars reject the abstracted postmodern aspects of cultural sociology, and instead, look for a theoretical backing in the more scientific vein of social psychology and cognitive science . The sociology of culture grew from
7104-456: 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
7296-491: A silver medal prize in the Apothecaries' yearly competition, Huxley was admitted to study at Charing Cross Hospital , where he obtained a small scholarship. At Charing Cross, he was taught by Thomas Wharton Jones , Professor of Ophthalmic Medicine and Surgery at University College London . Jones had been Robert Knox 's assistant when Knox bought cadavers from Burke and Hare . The young Wharton Jones, who acted as go-between,
7488-425: A single biological generation. They may also lie dormant for long periods of time. Memes reproduce by copying from a nervous system to another one, either by communication or imitation . Imitation often involves the copying of an observed behavior of another individual. Communication may be direct or indirect, where memes transmit from one individual to another through a copy recorded in an inanimate source, such as
7680-428: A social group. Cultural change , or repositioning, is the reconstruction of a cultural concept of a society. Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies. Organizations like UNESCO attempt to preserve culture and cultural heritage. Culture is considered a central concept in anthropology , encompassing
7872-413: A specific region or location. Humans acquire culture through the learning processes of enculturation and socialization , which is shown by the diversity of cultures across societies. A cultural norm codifies acceptable conduct in society; it serves as a guideline for behavior, dress, language, and demeanor in a situation, which serves as a template for expectations in a social group. Accepting only
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8064-634: A street in the Bronx , New York was named in his honor (Huxley Avenue). As recognition of his many public services, he was appointed Privy Councillor in 1892. Despite his many achievements, he was given no award by the British state until late in life. In this, he did better than Darwin, who got no award of any kind from the state. (Darwin's proposed knighthood was vetoed by ecclesiastical advisers, including Wilberforce.) Perhaps Huxley had commented too often on his dislike of honours, or perhaps his many assaults on
8256-423: A successful meme may or may not need to provide any benefit to its host. Unlike genetic evolution, memetic evolution can show both Darwinian and Lamarckian traits. Cultural memes will have the characteristic of Lamarckian inheritance when a host aspires to replicate the given meme through inference rather than by exactly copying it. Take for example the case of the transmission of a simple skill such as hammering
8448-411: A thousand flowers bloom" or "To everything there is a season"). People with autism showed a significant tendency to closely paraphrase and repeat content from the original statement (for example: "Don't cut flowers before they bloom"). Controls tended to infer a wider range of cultural meanings with little replicated content (for example: "Go with the flow" or "Everyone should have equal opportunity"). Only
8640-590: A track record against evolution as far back as the previous Oxford B.A. meeting in 1847 when he attacked Chambers' Vestiges . For the more challenging task of opposing the Origin , and the implication that man descended from apes, he had been assiduously coached by Richard Owen —Owen stayed with him the night before the debate. On the day, Wilberforce repeated some of the arguments from his Quarterly Review article (written but not yet published), then ventured onto slippery ground. His famous jibe at Huxley (as to whether Huxley
8832-505: A view now held by modern biologists. The tendency has been for this fine anatomical work to be overshadowed by his energetic and controversial activity in favour of evolution, and by his extensive public work on scientific education, both of which had significant effects on society in Britain and elsewhere. Huxley's 1893 Romanes Lecture , "Evolution and Ethics", is exceedingly influential in China;
9024-569: Is comparative cultural studies , based on the disciplines of comparative literature and cultural studies. Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies had originated in the 1950s and 1960s, mainly under the influence of Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson , and Raymond Williams , and later that of Stuart Hall and others at
9216-497: Is a shortening (modeled on gene ) of mimeme , which comes from Ancient Greek mīmēma ( μίμημα ; pronounced [míːmɛːma] ), meaning 'imitated thing', itself from mimeisthai ( μιμεῖσθαι , 'to imitate'), from mimos ( μῖμος , 'mime'). The word was coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining
9408-413: Is absent in more than 100 cultures around the world, suggesting that such mayhem is not biologically inevitable. Second, the brain itself changes in response to experiences, raising the question of whether adolescent brain characteristics are the cause of teen tumult or rather the result of lifestyle and experiences." David Moshman has also stated in regards to adolescence that brain research "is crucial for
9600-447: Is accelerated in conditions of propagative difficulty, then we would expect to encounter variations of religious memes, established in general populations, addressed to scientific communities. Using a memetic approach, Robertson deconstructed two attempts to privilege religiously held spirituality in scientific discourse. Advantages of a memetic approach as compared to more traditional "modernization" and "supply side" theses in understanding
9792-745: Is also used to denote the complex networks of practices and accumulated knowledge and ideas that are transmitted through social interaction and exist in specific human groups, or cultures, using the plural form. Raimon Panikkar identified 29 ways in which cultural change can be brought about, including growth, development, evolution, involution , renovation, reconception , reform, innovation , revivalism, revolution , mutation , progress , diffusion , osmosis , borrowing, eclecticism , syncretism , modernization, indigenization , and transformation. In this context, modernization could be viewed as adoption of Enlightenment era beliefs and practices, such as science, rationalism, industry, commerce, democracy, and
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#17328592868889984-454: Is as important as human rationality. Moreover, Herder proposed a collective form of Bildung : "For Herder, Bildung was the totality of experiences that provide a coherent identity, and sense of common destiny, to a people." In 1795, the Prussian linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) called for an anthropology that would synthesize Kant's and Herder's interests. During
10176-407: Is attached to the shoulder or pelvis by a single bone, the humerus or femur. His interest in these fish brought him close to the origin of tetrapods , one of the most important areas of vertebrate palaeontology. The study of fossil reptiles led to his demonstrating the fundamental affinity of birds and reptiles, which he united under the title of Sauropsida . His papers on Archaeopteryx and
10368-453: Is beneficial because it serves to emphasize transmission and acquisition properties that parallel the study of epidemiology . These properties make salient the sometimes parasitic nature of acquired memes, and as a result individuals should be motivated to reflectively acquire memes using what he calls a " Neurathian bootstrap " process. In Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology , Jack Balkin argued that memetic processes can explain many of
10560-422: Is concerned with the meaning and practices of everyday life. These practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching television or eating out) in a given culture. It also studies the meanings and uses people attribute to various objects and practices. Specifically, culture involves those meanings and practices held independently of reason. Watching television to view a public perspective on
10752-469: Is necessarily situated within the value system of a given culture. The modern term "culture" is based on a term used by the ancient Roman orator Cicero in his Tusculanae Disputationes , where he wrote of a cultivation of the soul or "cultura animi", using an agricultural metaphor for the development of a philosophical soul, understood teleologically as the highest possible ideal for human development. Samuel Pufendorf took over this metaphor in
10944-525: Is no reason to think that the same balance will exist in the selection pressures on memes. Semiotic theorists such as Terrence Deacon and Kalevi Kull regard the concept of a meme as a primitivized or degenerate concept of a sign , containing only a sign's basic ability to be copied, but lacks other core elements of the sign concept such as translation and interpretation. Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr similarly disapproved of Dawkins's gene-based view of meme, asserting it to be an "unnecessary synonym" for
11136-515: Is organized into four fields, each of which plays an important role in research on culture: biological anthropology , linguistic anthropology , cultural anthropology , and in the United States and Canada, archaeology . The term Kulturbrille , or "culture glasses," coined by German American anthropologist Franz Boas , refers to the "lenses" through which a person sees their own culture. Martin Lindstrom asserts that Kulturbrille , which allow
11328-513: Is reprobated as "utterly dishonourable to Natural Science." If I confine my retrospect of the reception of the Origin of Species to a twelvemonth, or thereabouts, from the time of its publication, I do not recollect anything quite so foolish and unmannerly as the Quarterly Review article... Since his death, Huxley has become known as "Darwin's Bulldog", taken to refer to his pluck and courage in debate, and to his perceived role in protecting
11520-463: Is somewhat ambiguous. He welcomed N. K. Humphrey 's suggestion that "memes should be considered as living structures, not just metaphorically", and proposed to regard memes as "physically residing in the brain". Although Dawkins said his original intentions had been simpler, he approved Humphrey's opinion and he endorsed Susan Blackmore 's 1999 project to give a scientific theory of memes, complete with predictions and empirical support. The term meme
11712-545: 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
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#173285928688811904-520: Is the physical evidence of a culture in the objects and architecture they make or have made. The term tends to be relevant only in archeological and anthropological studies, but it specifically means all material evidence which can be attributed to culture, past or present. Cultural sociology first emerged in Weimar Germany (1918–1933), where sociologists such as Alfred Weber used the term Kultursoziologie ('cultural sociology'). Cultural sociology
12096-536: The Quarterly Review , running to 17,000 words. The authorship of this latter review was not known for sure until Wilberforce's son wrote his biography. So it can be said that, just as Darwin groomed Huxley, so Owen groomed Wilberforce; and both the proxies fought public battles on behalf of their principals as much as themselves. Though we do not know the exact words of the Oxford debate, we do know what Huxley thought of
12288-865: The Copley Medal in 1888 and the Darwin Medal in 1894; the Geological Society awarded him the Wollaston Medal in 1876; the Linnean Society awarded him the Linnean Medal in 1890. There were many other elections and appointments to eminent scientific bodies; these and his many academic awards are listed in the Life and Letters . He turned down many other appointments, notably the Linacre chair in zoology at Oxford and
12480-594: The Native Americans who were being conquered by Europeans from the 16th centuries on were living in a state of nature; this opposition was expressed through the contrast between "civilized" and "uncivilized." According to this way of thinking, one could classify some countries and nations as more civilized than others and some people as more cultured than others. This contrast led to Herbert Spencer 's theory of Social Darwinism and Lewis Henry Morgan 's theory of cultural evolution . Just as some critics have argued that
12672-773: The Romantic movement was an interest in folklore , which led to identifying a "culture" among non-elites. This distinction is often characterized as that between high culture , namely that of the ruling social group , and low culture . In other words, the idea of "culture" that developed in Europe during the 18th and early 19th centuries reflected inequalities within European societies. Matthew Arnold contrasted "culture" with anarchy ; other Europeans, following philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau , contrasted "culture" with "the state of nature." According to Hobbes and Rousseau,
12864-532: The Romantic era , scholars in Germany , especially those concerned with nationalist movements—such as the nationalist struggle to create a "Germany" out of diverse principalities, and the nationalist struggles by ethnic minorities against the Austro-Hungarian Empire —developed a more inclusive notion of culture as " worldview " ( Weltanschauung ). According to this school of thought, each ethnic group has
13056-585: The University of London , winning the gold medal for anatomy and physiology . However, he did not present himself for the final (Second M.B.) exams and consequently did not qualify for a university degree. His apprenticeships and exam results formed a sufficient basis for his application to the Royal Navy . Aged 20, Huxley was too young to apply to the Royal College of Surgeons for a licence to practise, yet he
13248-542: The evolution of the horse has many other members, and the overall appearance of the tree of descent is more like a bush than a straight line. The horse series also strongly suggested that the process was gradual, and that the origin of the modern horse lay in North America, not in Eurasia. If so, then something must have happened to horses in North America, since none were there when Europeans arrived. The experience with Marsh
13440-453: The origin of birds were of great interest then and still are. Apart from his interest in persuading the world that man was a primate and had descended from the same stock as the apes, Huxley did little work on mammals, with one exception. On his tour of America Huxley was shown the remarkable series of fossil horses, discovered by O. C. Marsh , in Yale 's Peabody Museum . An Easterner, Marsh
13632-431: The 20th century. Some schools of philosophy, such as Marxism and critical theory , have argued that culture is often used politically as a tool of the elites to manipulate the proletariat and create a false consciousness . Such perspectives are common in the discipline of cultural studies . In the wider social sciences , the theoretical perspective of cultural materialism holds that human symbolic culture arises from
13824-869: The Advancement of Science 1869–1870; president of the Quekett Microscopical Club 1878; president of the Royal Society 1883–1885; Inspector of Fisheries 1881–1885; and president of the Marine Biological Association 1884–1890. He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1869. The thirty-one years during which Huxley occupied the chair of natural history at the Royal School of Mines included work on vertebrate palaeontology and on many projects to advance
14016-518: The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham . This included overtly political, left-wing views, and criticisms of popular culture as "capitalist" mass culture ; it absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School critique of the " culture industry " (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences: see
14208-606: The Chinese translation of Huxley's lecture even transformed the Chinese translation of Darwin's Origin of Species . Thomas Henry Huxley was born in Ealing , then a village in Middlesex . He was the second youngest of eight children of George Huxley and Rachel Withers. His parents were members of the Church of England, but he sympathized with nonconformists . Like some other British scientists of
14400-638: The Event of Armed Conflict and the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions deal with the protection of culture. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights deals with cultural heritage in two ways: it gives people the right to participate in cultural life on the one hand and the right to the protection of their contributions to cultural life on
14592-720: The Mastership of University College, Oxford . In 1873 the King of Sweden made Huxley, Hooker and Tyndall Knights of the Order of the Polar Star : they could wear the insignia but not use the title in Britain. Huxley collected many honorary memberships of foreign societies, academic awards and honorary doctorates from Britain and Germany. He also became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1892. In 1916,
14784-528: The Natural History of Creation , a book which contained some quite pertinent arguments in favour of evolution. Huxley had also rejected Lamarck's theory of transmutation, on the basis that there was insufficient evidence to support it. All this scepticism was brought together in a lecture to the Royal Institution, which made Darwin anxious enough to set about an effort to change young Huxley's mind. It
14976-577: The Royal Society, persuaded government about science, and established scientific education in British schools and universities. He was awarded the highest honours then open to British men of science. The Royal Society , who had elected him as Fellow when he was 25 (1851), awarded him the Royal Medal the next year (1852), a year before Charles Darwin got the same award. He was the youngest biologist to receive such recognition. Then later in life he received
15168-813: The U.S. feminist movement involved new practices that produced a shift in gender relations, altering both gender and economic structures. Environmental conditions may also enter as factors. For example, after tropical forests returned at the end of the last ice age , plants suitable for domestication were available, leading to the invention of agriculture , which in turn brought about many cultural innovations and shifts in social dynamics. Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies, which may also produce—or inhibit—social shifts and changes in cultural practices. War or competition over resources may impact technological development or social dynamics. Additionally, cultural ideas may transfer from one society to another, through diffusion or acculturation. In diffusion ,
15360-478: The United States. In the 19th century, humanists such as English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) used the word "culture" to refer to an ideal of individual human refinement, of "the best that has been thought and said in the world." This concept of culture is also comparable to the German concept of bildung : "...culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all
15552-576: The anxious, unstable, and rebellious adolescent has been criticized by experts, such as Robert Epstein , who state that an undeveloped brain is not the main cause of teenagers' turmoils. Some have criticized this understanding of adolescence, classifying it as a relatively recent phenomenon in human history created by modern society, and have been highly critical of what they view as the infantilization of young adults in American society. According to Robert Epstein and Jennifer, "American-style teen turmoil
15744-676: The centre of a materialistic theory of mind and of personal identity . Prominent researchers in evolutionary psychology and anthropology , including Scott Atran , Dan Sperber , Pascal Boyer , John Tooby and others, argue the possibility of incompatibility between modularity of mind and memetics. In their view, minds structure certain communicable aspects of the ideas produced, and these communicable aspects generally trigger or elicit ideas in other minds through inference (to relatively rich structures generated from often low-fidelity input) and not high-fidelity replication or imitation. Atran discusses communication involving religious beliefs as
15936-461: The claim that memetics ignores established advances in other fields of cultural study, such as sociology , cultural anthropology , cognitive psychology , and social psychology . Questions remain whether or not the meme concept counts as a validly disprovable scientific theory. This view regards memetics as a theory in its infancy: a protoscience to proponents, or a pseudoscience to some detractors. One frequent criticism of meme theory looks at
16128-399: The common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G.C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo , Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong. In that context, Dawkins defined the meme as a unit of cultural transmission , or a unit of imitation and replication, but later definitions would vary. The lack of
16320-490: The concept of bildung : "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity." He argued that this immaturity comes not from a lack of understanding, but from a lack of courage to think independently. Against this intellectual cowardice, Kant urged: " Sapere Aude " ("Dare to be wise!"). In reaction to Kant, German scholars such as Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) argued that human creativity, which necessarily takes unpredictable and highly diverse forms,
16512-423: The contagious imitation of memes from instinctively contagious phenomena such as yawning and laughing, which they consider innate (rather than socially learned) behaviors. Aaron Lynch described seven general patterns of meme transmission, or "thought contagion": Dawkins initially defined meme as a noun that "conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation ". John S. Wilkins retained
16704-408: The death of his eldest son Noel, who died of scarlet fever in 1860; Huxley's wife Henrietta Anne née Heathorn and son Noel are also buried there. Huxley and his wife had five daughters and three sons: From 1870 onwards, Huxley was to some extent drawn away from scientific research by the claims of public duty. He served on eight Royal Commissions , from 1862 to 1884. From 1871 to 1880 he
16896-597: The debate at the British Association meeting, on Saturday 30 June 1860 at the Oxford University Museum. Huxley's presence there had been encouraged on the previous evening when he met Robert Chambers, the Scottish publisher and author of Vestiges , who was walking the streets of Oxford in a dispirited state, and begged for assistance. The debate followed the presentation of a paper by John William Draper , and
17088-463: The debate, and written less than a month afterwards. Other eyewitnesses, with one or two exceptions (Hooker especially thought he had made the best points), give similar accounts, at varying dates after the event. The general view was and still is that Huxley got much the better of the exchange, though Wilberforce himself thought he had done quite well. In the absence of a verbatim report, differing perceptions are difficult to judge fairly; Huxley wrote
17280-679: The debates that followed the book's publication. Huxley's support started with his anonymous favourable review of the Origin in the Times for 26 December 1859, and continued with articles in several periodicals, and in a lecture at the Royal Institution in February 1860. At the same time, Richard Owen , whilst writing an extremely hostile anonymous review of the Origin in the Edinburgh Review , also primed Samuel Wilberforce who wrote one in
17472-428: The difficulty involved in delimiting memes as discrete units. She notes that while the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony ( listen ) form a meme widely replicated as an independent unit, one can regard the entire symphony as a single meme as well. 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
17664-434: The discipline itself, developed. Huxley's detailed anatomical work was, as always, first-rate and productive. His work on fossil fish shows his distinctive approach: Whereas pre-Darwinian naturalists collected, identified, and classified, Huxley worked mainly to reveal the evolutionary relationships between groups. The lobe-finned fish (such as coelacanths and lungfish ) have paired appendages whose internal skeleton
17856-434: The distinction between high and low cultures is an expression of the conflict between European elites and non-elites, other critics have argued that the distinction between civilized and uncivilized people is an expression of the conflict between European colonial powers and their colonial subjects. Other 19th-century critics, following Rousseau, have accepted this differentiation between higher and lower culture, but have seen
18048-423: The economic basis (such as tourism) of a state, region or municipality. Tourism is having an increasing impact on the various forms of culture. On the one hand, this can be physical impact on individual objects or the destruction caused by increasing environmental pollution and, on the other hand, socio-cultural effects on society. Thomas Henry Huxley Thomas Henry Huxley (4 May 1825 – 29 June 1895)
18240-731: The environmental context in which they exist rather than in any special source or manner to their origination. Balkin describes racist beliefs as "fantasy" memes that become harmful or unjust "ideologies" when diverse peoples come together, as through trade or competition. Richard Dawkins called for a re-analysis of religion in terms of the evolution of self-replicating ideas apart from any resulting biological advantages they might bestow. As an enthusiastic Darwinian, I have been dissatisfied with explanations that my fellow-enthusiasts have offered for human behaviour. They have tried to look for 'biological advantages' in various attributes of human civilization. For instance, tribal religion has been seen as
18432-411: The event of war and armed conflict. According to Karl von Habsburg , President of Blue Shield International, the destruction of cultural assets is also part of psychological warfare. The target of the attack is the identity of the opponent, which is why symbolic cultural assets become a main target. It is also intended to affect the particularly sensitive cultural memory, the growing cultural diversity and
18624-436: The evolution and propagation of religion were explored. Culture Culture ( / ˈ k ʌ l tʃ ər / KUL -chər ) is a concept that encompasses the social behavior , institutions , and norms found in human societies , as well as the knowledge , beliefs , arts , laws , customs , capabilities, attitude , and habits of the individuals in these groups. Culture is often originated from or attributed to
18816-609: 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 stabilize information transfer. Dennett notes that spiritual narratives, including music and dance forms, can survive in full detail across any number of generations even in cultures with oral tradition only. In contrast, when applying only meme theory, memes for which stable copying methods are available will inevitably get selected for survival more often than those which can only have unstable mutations (such as
19008-640: The features common to the most widely practiced religions provide built-in advantages in an evolutionary context, she writes. For example, religions that preach of the value of faith over evidence from everyday experience or reason inoculate societies against many of the most basic tools people commonly use to evaluate their ideas. By linking altruism with religious affiliation, religious memes can proliferate more quickly because people perceive that they can reap societal as well as personal rewards. The longevity of religious memes improves with their documentation in revered religious texts . Aaron Lynch attributed
19200-530: The field, distance themselves from this view. They criticize the Marxist assumption of a single, dominant meaning, shared by all, for any cultural product. The non-Marxist approaches suggest that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the meaning of the product. This view comes through in the book Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (by Paul du Gay et al. ), which seeks to challenge
19392-420: The first time indicated the direct line of descent of an existing animal. With the generosity of true greatness, he gave up his own opinions in the face of new truth, and took my conclusions as the basis of his famous New York lecture on the horse." Huxley was originally not persuaded by "development theory", as evolution was once called. This can be seen in his savage review of Robert Chambers ' Vestiges of
19584-433: The form of something (though not necessarily its meaning) moves from one culture to another. For example, Western restaurant chains and culinary brands sparked curiosity and fascination to the Chinese as China opened its economy to international trade in the late 20th-century. "Stimulus diffusion" (the sharing of ideas) refers to an element of one culture leading to an invention or propagation in another. "Direct borrowing", on
19776-606: 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. 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
19968-415: The globe during the process of colonization . Related processes on an individual level include assimilation (adoption of a different culture by an individual) and transculturation . The transnational flow of culture has played a major role in merging different cultures and sharing thoughts, ideas, and beliefs. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) formulated an individualist definition of "enlightenment" similar to
20160-483: The highly stratified capitalist systems of the West . In 1870 the anthropologist Edward Tylor (1832–1917) applied these ideas of higher versus lower culture to propose a theory of the evolution of religion . According to this theory, religion evolves from more polytheistic to more monotheistic forms. In the process, he redefined culture as a diverse set of activities characteristic of all human societies. This view paved
20352-465: The horse fossils were really special. After a week with Marsh and his fossils, Huxley wrote excitedly, "The collection of fossils is the most wonderful thing I ever saw." The collection at that time went from the small four-toed forest-dwelling Orohippus from the Eocene through three-toed species such as Miohippus to species more like the modern horse. By looking at their teeth he could see that, as
20544-419: The idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units, and are especially critical of the biological nature of the theory's underpinnings. Others have argued that this use of the term is the result of a misunderstanding of the original proposal. The word meme itself is a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins , originating from his 1976 book The Selfish Gene . Dawkins's own position
20736-424: The immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization (including practices of political organization and social institutions ), mythology , philosophy , literature (both written and oral ), and science comprise the intangible cultural heritage of a society. In the humanities , one sense of culture as an attribute of the individual has been the degree to which they have cultivated
20928-456: The indebtedness believers have to their Savior for sacrifice on the cross. The image of the crucifixion recurs in religious sacraments , and the proliferation of symbols of the cross in homes and churches potently reinforces the wide array of Christian memes. Although religious memes have proliferated in human cultures, the modern scientific community has been relatively resistant to religious belief. Robertson (2007) reasoned that if evolution
21120-414: The intersection between sociology (as shaped by early theorists like Marx , Durkheim , and Weber ) with the growing discipline of anthropology , wherein researchers pioneered ethnographic strategies for describing and analyzing a variety of cultures around the world. Part of the legacy of the early development of the field lingers in the methods (much of cultural, sociological research is qualitative), in
21312-431: The liberatory aspects of fandom . The distinction between American and British strands, however, has faded. Some researchers, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the field. This strain of thinking has some influence from the Frankfurt School , but especially from the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and others. The main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach concentrates on
21504-405: The lower classes, distinguished by the stratified access to cultural capital . In common parlance, culture is often used to refer specifically to the symbolic markers used by ethnic groups to distinguish themselves visibly from each other such as body modification , clothing or jewelry . Mass culture refers to the mass-produced and mass mediated forms of consumer culture that emerged in
21696-416: The material conditions of human life, as humans create the conditions for physical survival, and that the basis of culture is found in evolved biological dispositions. When used as a count noun , a "culture" is the set of customs, traditions , and values of a society or community, such as an ethnic group or nation. Culture is the set of knowledge acquired over time. In this sense, multiculturalism values
21888-407: The matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world." In practice, culture referred to an elite ideal and was associated with such activities as art , classical music , and haute cuisine . As these forms were associated with urban life, "culture" was identified with "civilization" (from Latin: civitas , lit. 'city'). Another facet of
22080-597: The media surrounding Internet culture has enabled Internet memetic research to depart in empirical interests from previous memetic goals. Regardless of Internet Memetic's divergence in theoretical interests, it plays a significant role in theorizing and empirically investigating the connection between cultural ideologies, behaviors, and their mediation processes. Memes, analogously to genes, vary in their aptitude to replicate; successful memes remain and spread, whereas unfit ones stall and are forgotten. Thus, memes that prove more effective at replicating and surviving are selected in
22272-421: The medium itself has an influence in the meme's evolutionary outcomes. Thus, he refers to the medium as an "interactor" to avoid this determinism. Alternatively, Daniel Dennett suggests that the medium and the idea are not distinct in that memes only exist because of their medium. Dennett argued this in order to remain consistent with his denial of qualia and the notion of materially deterministic evolution which
22464-404: The meme pool. Memes first need retention. The longer a meme stays in its hosts, the higher its chances of propagation are. When a host uses a meme, the meme's life is extended. The reuse of the neural space hosting a certain meme's copy to host different memes is the greatest threat to that meme's copy. A meme that increases the longevity of its hosts will generally survive longer. On the contrary,
22656-606: The memes of transmission in Christianity as especially powerful in scope. Believers view the conversion of non-believers both as a religious duty and as an act of altruism. The promise of heaven to believers and threat of hell to non-believers provide a strong incentive for members to retain their belief. Lynch asserts that belief in the Crucifixion of Jesus in Christianity amplifies each of its other replication advantages through
22848-431: The most familiar features of ideological thought. His theory of "cultural software" maintained that memes form narratives , social networks, metaphoric and metonymic models, and a variety of different mental structures. Balkin maintains that the same structures used to generate ideas about free speech or free markets also serve to generate racistic beliefs. To Balkin, whether memes become harmful or maladaptive depends on
23040-449: The name of Hydrozoa . The connection he made was that all the members of the class consisted of two cell layers, enclosing a central cavity or stomach. This is characteristic of the phylum now called the Cnidaria . He compared this feature to the serous and mucous structures of embryos of higher animals. When at last he got a grant from the Royal Society for the printing of plates, Huxley
23232-577: The navy by refusing to return to active service, and in July 1854 he became professor of natural history at the Royal School of Mines and naturalist to the British Geological Survey in the following year. In addition, he was Fullerian Professor at the Royal Institution 1855–1858 and 1865–1867; Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons 1863–1869; president of the British Association for
23424-412: The nineteenth century such as Alfred Russel Wallace , Huxley was brought up in a literate middle-class family which had fallen on hard times. His father was a mathematics teacher at Great Ealing School until it closed, putting the family into financial difficulties. As a result, Thomas left school at the age of 10, after only two years of formal schooling. Despite this lack of formal schooling, Huxley
23616-480: The noted music and dance forms), which, according to meme theory, should have resulted in those forms of cultural expression going extinct. A second common criticism of meme theory views it as a reductionist and inadequate version of more accepted anthropological theories. Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths noted the cumulative evolution of genes depends on biological selection-pressures neither too great nor too small in relation to mutation-rates, while pointing out there
23808-489: 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". 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
24000-422: The notion of progress. Rein Raud , building on the work of Umberto Eco , Pierre Bourdieu and Jeffrey C. Alexander , has proposed a model of cultural change based on claims and bids, which are judged by their cognitive adequacy and endorsed or not endorsed by the symbolic authority of the cultural community in question. Cultural invention has come to mean any innovation that is new and found to be useful to
24192-538: The notion that those who produce commodities control the meanings that people attribute to them. Feminist cultural analyst, theorist, and art historian Griselda Pollock contributed to cultural studies from viewpoints of art history and psychoanalysis . The writer Julia Kristeva is among influential voices at the turn of the century, contributing to cultural studies from the field of art and psychoanalytical French feminism . Petrakis and Kostis (2013) divide cultural background variables into two main groups: In 2016,
24384-466: The older man. The sobriquet appears to be Huxley's own invention, although of unknown date, and it was not current in his lifetime. While the second half of Darwin's life was lived mainly within his family, the younger and combative Huxley operated mainly out in the world at large. A letter from Huxley to Ernst Haeckel (2 November 1871) states: "The dogs have been snapping at [Darwin's] heels too much of late." Famously, Huxley responded to Wilberforce in
24576-541: The organization of production. In the United Kingdom, cultural studies focuses largely on the study of popular culture ; that is, on the social meanings of mass-produced consumer and leisure goods. Richard Hoggart coined the term in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies or CCCS. It has since become strongly associated with Stuart Hall , who succeeded Hoggart as Director. Cultural studies in this sense, then, can be viewed as
24768-656: The original. Later on, as a young adult, he made himself an expert, first teaching himself about invertebrates , and later on vertebrates . He did many of the illustrations for his publications on marine invertebrates. In his later debates and writing on science and religion, his grasp of theology was better than many of his clerical opponents. He was apprenticed for short periods to several medical practitioners: at 13 to his brother-in-law John Cooke in Coventry, who passed him on to Thomas Chandler, notable for his experiments using mesmerism for medical purposes. Chandler's practice
24960-532: The other hand, tends to refer to technological or tangible diffusion from one culture to another. Diffusion of innovations theory presents a research-based model of why and when individuals and cultures adopt new ideas, practices, and products. Acculturation has different meanings. Still, in this context, it refers to the replacement of traits of one culture with another, such as what happened to certain Native American tribes and many indigenous peoples across
25152-405: The other. In the 21st century, the protection of culture has been the focus of increasing activity by national and international organizations. The UN and UNESCO promote cultural preservation and cultural diversity through declarations and legally-binding conventions or treaties. The aim is not to protect a person's property, but rather to preserve the cultural heritage of humanity, especially in
25344-407: The parent religious memeplex. Similar memes are thereby included in the majority of religious memeplexes, and harden over time; they become an "inviolable canon" or set of dogmas , eventually finding their way into secular law . This could also be referred to as the propagation of a taboo . Memetics is the name of the field of science that studies memes and their evolution and culture spread. While
25536-439: The peaceful coexistence and mutual respect between different cultures inhabiting the same planet. Sometimes "culture" is also used to describe specific practices within a subgroup of a society, a subculture (e.g. " bro culture "), or a counterculture . Within cultural anthropology , the ideology and analytical stance of cultural relativism hold that cultures cannot easily be objectively ranked or evaluated because any evaluation
25728-507: The perceived gap in the gene/meme analogy. For example, Luis Benitez-Bribiesca points to the lack of a "code script" for memes (analogous to the DNA of genes), and to the excessive instability of the meme mutation mechanism (that of an idea going from one brain to another), which would lead to a low replication accuracy and a high mutation rate, rendering the evolutionary process chaotic. In his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea , Daniel C. Dennett points to
25920-422: The perpetuation of cultural ideas and practices within current structures , which themselves are subject to change. Social conflict and the development of technologies can produce changes within a society by altering social dynamics and promoting new cultural models , and spurring or enabling generative action. These social shifts may accompany ideological shifts and other types of cultural change. For example,
26112-535: The phylum Chordata . Other papers on the morphology of the cephalopods and on brachiopods and rotifers are also noteworthy. Following a lecture at the Royal Institution on 30 April 1852 Huxley indicated that it remained difficult to earn a living as a scientist alone. This was demonstrated in a letter written on 3 May 1852, where he states "Science in England does everything—but PAY. You may earn praise but not pudding". However, Huxley effectively resigned from
26304-496: The place of science in British life. Huxley retired in 1885, after a bout of depressive illness which started in 1884. He resigned the presidency of the Royal Society in mid-term, the Inspectorship of Fisheries, and his chair (as soon as he decently could) and took six months' leave. His pension was £1200 a year. Huxley's London home, in which he wrote many of his works, was at 4 Marlborough Place , St John's Wood . The house
26496-462: The process by which memes survive and change through the evolution of culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution . Dawkins noted that in a society with culture a person need not have biological descendants to remain influential in the actions of individuals thousands of years after their death: But if you contribute to the world's culture, if you have a good idea...it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in
26688-439: The production of meaning . This model assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as residing with those producing cultural artifacts . In a Marxist view, the mode and relations of production form the economic base of society, which constantly interacts and influences superstructures , such as culture. Other approaches to cultural studies, such as feminist cultural studies and later American developments of
26880-414: The properties necessary for evolution, and thus sees meme evolution as not simply analogous to genetic evolution, but as a real phenomenon subject to the laws of natural selection . Dawkins noted that as various ideas pass from one generation to the next, they may either enhance or detract from the survival of the people who obtain those ideas, or influence the survival of the ideas themselves. For example,
27072-434: The range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies . Cultural universals are found in all human societies. These include expressive forms like art , music , dance , ritual , religion , and technologies like tool usage , cooking , shelter , and clothing . The concept of material culture covers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture and art, whereas
27264-495: The refinement and sophistication of high culture as corrupting and unnatural developments that obscure and distort people's essential nature. These critics considered folk music (as produced by "the folk," i.e., rural, illiterate, peasants) to honestly express a natural way of life, while classical music seemed superficial and decadent. Equally, this view often portrayed indigenous peoples as " noble savages " living authentic and unblemished lives, uncomplicated and uncorrupted by
27456-644: The remains of Pithecanthropus erectus (now known as Homo erectus ). He died of a heart attack (after contracting influenza and pneumonia) in 1895 in Eastbourne, and was buried in London at East Finchley Cemetery . No invitations were sent out but two hundred people turned up for the funeral; they included Joseph Dalton Hooker , William Henry Flower , Mulford B. Foster , Edwin Lankester , Joseph Lister , and apparently Henry James . The family plot had been purchased upon
27648-599: The review in the Quarterly : Since Lord Brougham assailed Dr Young , the world has seen no such specimen of the insolence of a shallow pretender to a Master in Science as this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a "flighty" person, who endeavours "to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation," and whose "mode of dealing with nature"
27840-499: The robustness of religious memes in human culture to the fact that such memes incorporate multiple modes of meme transmission. Religious memes pass down the generations from parent to child and across a single generation through the meme-exchange of proselytism . Most people will hold the religion taught them by their parents throughout their life. Many religions feature adversarial elements, punishing apostasy , for instance, or demonizing infidels . In Thought Contagion Lynch identifies
28032-418: The same basic elements. According to Bastian, all human societies share a set of "elementary ideas" ( Elementargedanken ); different cultures, or different "folk ideas" ( Völkergedanken ), are local modifications of the elementary ideas. This view paved the way for the modern understanding of culture. Franz Boas (1858–1942) was trained in this tradition, and he brought it with him when he left Germany for
28224-524: The same pressures of evolution as were biological attributes was discussed in the time of Charles Darwin. T. H. Huxley (1880) claimed that "The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals." In 1904, Richard Semon published Die Mneme (which appeared in English in 1924 as The Mneme ). The term mneme
28416-449: The same word goes back to Latin colere , 'to inhabit, care for, till, worship' and cultus , 'A cult, especially a religious one.' To be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensely to cultivate it—to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly." Culture described by Richard Velkley : ... originally meant the cultivation of the soul or mind, acquires most of its later modern meaning in
28608-478: 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. Dan Deacon, Kalevi Kull separately argued memes are degenerate Signs in that they offer only a partial explanation of the triadic in Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotic theory:
28800-535: The senses. Initially, Dawkins did not seriously give context to the material of memetics. He considered a meme to be an idea, and thus a mental concept. However, from Dawkins' initial conception, it is how a medium might function in relation to the meme which has garnered the most attention. For example, David Hull suggested that while memes might exist as Dawkins conceives of them, he finds it important to suggest that instead of determining them as idea "replicators" (i.e. mind-determinant influences) one might notice that
28992-550: The size grew larger and the toes reduced, the teeth changed from those of a browser to those of a grazer. All such changes could be explained by a general alteration in habitat from forest to grassland. And, it is now known, that is what did happen over large areas of North America from the Eocene to the Pleistocene : The ultimate causative agent was global temperature reduction (see Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum ). The modern account of
29184-478: The spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given in Dawkins' book include melodies , catchphrases , fashion, and the technology of building arches. Although Richard Dawkins invented the term meme and developed meme theory, he has not claimed that the idea was entirely novel, and there have been other expressions for similar ideas in the past. For instance, the possibility that ideas were subject to
29376-427: The subjects with autism—who lack the degree of inferential capacity normally associated with aspects of theory of mind —came close to functioning as "meme machines". In his book The Robot's Rebellion , Keith Stanovich uses the memes and memeplex concepts to describe a program of cognitive reform that he refers to as a "rebellion". Specifically, Stanovich argues that the use of memes as a descriptor for cultural units
29568-455: The surviving story of the debate is a later fabrication. Huxley had been planning to leave Oxford on the previous day, but, after an encounter with Robert Chambers , the author of Vestiges , he changed his mind and decided to join the debate. Wilberforce was coached by Richard Owen , against whom Huxley also debated about whether humans were closely related to apes. Huxley was slow to accept some of Darwin's ideas, such as gradualism , and
29760-406: 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 and social sciences . 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
29952-819: The term "meme" appeared in various forms in German and Austrian texts near the turn of the 20th century, Dawkin's unrelated use of the term in The Selfish Gene marked its emergence into mainstream study. Based on the Dawkin's framing of a meme as a cultural analogue to a gene, meme theory originated as an attempt to apply biological evolutionary principles to cultural information transfer and cultural evolution . Thus, memetics attempts to apply conventional scientific methods (such as those used in population genetics and epidemiology ) to explain existing patterns and transmission of cultural ideas. Principal criticisms of memetics include
30144-544: The term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator . He hypothesized that one could view many cultural entities as replicators, and pointed to melodies, fashions and learned skills as examples. Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behavior. Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time. Dawkins likened
30336-435: The texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture. Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of culture. Culture, for a cultural-studies researcher, not only includes traditional high culture (the culture of ruling social groups ) and popular culture , but also everyday meanings and practices. The last two, in fact, have become the main focus of cultural studies. A further and recent approach
30528-771: The theories (a variety of critical approaches to sociology are central to current research communities), and in the substantive focus of the field. For instance, relationships between popular culture , political control, and social class were early and lasting concerns in the field. In the United Kingdom, sociologists and other scholars influenced by Marxism such as Stuart Hall (1932–2014) and Raymond Williams (1921–1988) developed cultural studies . Following nineteenth-century Romantics, they identified culture with consumption goods and leisure activities (such as art, music, film, food , sports, and clothing). They saw patterns of consumption and leisure as determined by relations of production , which led them to focus on class relations and
30720-527: The traces of memetic processing can be quantified utilizing neuroimaging techniques which measure changes in the "connectivity profiles between brain regions". 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 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
30912-555: The tradition of textual theory. Starting in the 1990s, psychological research on culture influence began to grow and challenge the universality assumed in general psychology. Culture psychologists began to try to explore the relationship between emotions and culture , and answer whether the human mind is independent from culture. For example, people from collectivistic cultures, such as the Japanese, suppress their positive emotions more than their American counterparts. Culture may affect
31104-473: The traditional beliefs of organised religion made enemies in the establishment – he had vigorous debates in print with Benjamin Disraeli , William Ewart Gladstone , and Arthur Balfour , and his relationship with Lord Salisbury was less than tranquil. Huxley was for about thirty years evolution's most effective advocate, and for some Huxley was " the premier advocate of science in the nineteenth century [for]
31296-435: The way for the modern understanding of religion. Although anthropologists worldwide refer to Tylor's definition of culture, in the 20th century "culture" emerged as the central and unifying concept of American anthropology , where it most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode human experiences symbolically , and to communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially. American anthropology
31488-572: The way that people experience and express emotions. On the other hand, some researchers try to look for differences between people's personalities across cultures . As different cultures dictate distinctive norms , culture shock is also studied to understand how people react when they are confronted with other cultures. LGBT culture is displayed with significantly different levels of tolerance within different cultures and nations. Cognitive tools may not be accessible or they may function differently cross culture. For example, people who are raised in
31680-412: The ways of thinking, the ways of acting, and the material objects that together shape a people's way of life. Culture can be either of two types, non-material culture or material culture . Non-material culture refers to the non-physical ideas that individuals have about their culture, including values, belief systems, rules, norms, morals, language, organizations, and institutions, while material culture
31872-413: The welfare of their hosts. A field of study called memetics arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model . Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that academic study can examine memes empirically . However, developments in neuroimaging may make empirical study possible. Some commentators in the social sciences question
32064-452: The whole English-speaking world". Though he had many admirers and disciples, his retirement and later death left British zoology somewhat bereft of leadership. He had, directly or indirectly, guided the careers and appointments of the next generation. Huxley thought he was "the only man who can carry out my work": The deaths of Balfour and W.K. Clifford were "the greatest losses to science in our time". The first half of Huxley's career as
32256-465: The work of (for example) Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and Paul Gilroy . In the United States, Lindlof and Taylor write, "cultural studies [were] grounded in a pragmatic, liberal-pluralist tradition." The American version of cultural studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass culture ; for example, American cultural-studies advocates wrote about
32448-467: The work of geneticist L. L. Cavalli-Sforza , anthropologist F. T. Cloak, and ethologist J. M. Cullen. Dawkins wrote that evolution depended not on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmission—in the case of biological evolution, the gene. For Dawkins, the meme exemplified another self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution. Dawkins used
32640-471: The writings of the 18th-century German thinkers, who were on various levels developing Rousseau 's criticism of " modern liberalism and Enlightenment ." Thus a contrast between "culture" and " civilization " is usually implied in these authors, even when not expressed as such. In the words of anthropologist E.B. Tylor , it is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as
32832-588: Was "deep in debt". So, at a friend's suggestion, he applied for an appointment in the Royal Navy . He had references on character and certificates showing the time spent on his apprenticeship and on requirements such as dissection and pharmacy. William Burnett , the Physician General of the Navy, interviewed him and arranged for the College of Surgeons to test his competence (by means of a viva voce ). Finally, Huxley
33024-469: Was America's first professor of palaeontology, but also one who had come west into hostile Indian territory in search of fossils, hunted buffalo, and met Red Cloud (in 1874). Funded by his uncle George Peabody , Marsh had made some remarkable discoveries: the huge Cretaceous aquatic bird Hesperornis , and the dinosaur footprints along the Connecticut River were worth the trip by themselves, but
33216-426: Was a Secretary of the Royal Society and from 1883 to 1885 he was president. He was president of the Geological Society from 1868 to 1870. In 1870, he was president of the British Association at Liverpool and, in the same year was elected a member of the newly constituted London School Board . He was president of the Quekett Microscopical Club from 1877 to 1879. He was the leading person amongst those who reformed
33408-702: Was able to summarise this work in The Oceanic Hydrozoa , published by the Ray Society in 1859. The value of Huxley's work was recognised and, on returning to England in 1850, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In the following year, at the age of twenty-six, he not only received the Royal Society Medal but was also elected to the Council. He met Joseph Dalton Hooker and John Tyndall , who remained his lifelong friends. The Admiralty retained him as
33600-624: Was also used in Maurice Maeterlinck 's The Life of the White Ant (1926), with some parallels to Dawkins's concept. Kenneth Pike had, in 1954, coined the related terms emic and etic , generalizing the linguistic units of phoneme , morpheme , grapheme , lexeme , and tagmeme (as set out by Leonard Bloomfield ), distinguishing insider and outside views of communicative behavior. The word meme originated with Richard Dawkins ' 1976 book The Selfish Gene . Dawkins cites as inspiration
33792-409: Was an English biologist and anthropologist who specialized in comparative anatomy . He has become known as " Darwin's Bulldog " for his advocacy of Charles Darwin 's theory of evolution . The stories regarding Huxley's famous 1860 Oxford evolution debate with Samuel Wilberforce were a key moment in the wider acceptance of evolution and in his own career, although some historians think that
33984-522: Was arranged by Edward Forbes FRS (who had also been a pupil of Knox). Both before and after the voyage Forbes was something of a mentor to Huxley. Huxley's paper "On the anatomy and the affinities of the family of Medusae" was published in 1849 by the Royal Society in its Philosophical Transactions . Huxley united the Hydroid and Sertularian polyps with the Medusae to form a class to which he subsequently gave
34176-460: Was chaired by Darwin's former botany tutor John Stevens Henslow . Darwin's theory was opposed by the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce , and those supporting Darwin included Huxley and their mutual friends Hooker and Lubbock . The platform featured Brodie and Professor Beale, and Robert FitzRoy , who had been captain of HMS Beagle during Darwin's voyage, spoke against Darwin. Wilberforce had
34368-458: Was consistent with Dawkins' account. A particularly more divergent theory is that of Limor Shifman , a communication and media scholar of " Internet memetics ". She argues that any memetic argument which claims the distinction between the meme and the meme-vehicle (i.e. the meme's medium) are empirically observable is mistaken from the offset. Shifman claims to be following a similar theoretical direction as Susan Blackmore ; however, her attention to
34560-427: Was descended from an ape on his mother's side or his father's side) was probably unplanned, and certainly unwise. Huxley's reply to the effect that he would rather be descended from an ape than a man who misused his great talents to suppress debate—the exact wording is not certain—was widely recounted in pamphlets and a spoof play. The letters of Alfred Newton include one to his brother giving an eyewitness account of
34752-399: Was determined to educate himself. He became one of the great autodidacts of the nineteenth century. At first he read Thomas Carlyle , James Hutton 's Geology , and Hamilton 's Logic . In his teens, he taught himself German , eventually becoming fluent and used by Charles Darwin as a translator of scientific material in German. He learned Latin , and enough Greek to read Aristotle in
34944-424: Was enough for Huxley to give credence to Darwin's gradualism, and to introduce the story of the horse into his lecture series. Marsh's and Huxley's conclusions were initially quite different. However, Marsh carefully showed Huxley his complete sequence of fossils. As Marsh put it, Huxley "then informed me that all this was new to him and that my facts demonstrated the evolution of the horse beyond question, and for
35136-407: Was exonerated of crime, but thought it best to leave Scotland. In 1845, under Wharton Jones' guidance, Huxley published his first scientific paper demonstrating the existence of a hitherto unrecognised layer in the inner sheath of hairs, a layer that has been known since as Huxley's layer . Later in life, Huxley organised a pension for his old mentor. At twenty he passed his First M.B. examination at
35328-541: Was extended in the early 1870s to include a large drawing and dining room at which he held informal Sunday gatherings. In 1890, he moved from London to Eastbourne , where he had purchased land in the Staveley Road upon which a house was built, 'Hodeslea', under the supervision of his son-in-law F. Waller. Here Huxley edited the nine volumes of his Collected Essays . In 1894 he heard of Eugene Dubois ' discovery in Java of
35520-498: Was in London's Rotherhithe amidst the squalor endured by the Dickensian poor. Afterward, another brother-in-law took him on: John Salt, his eldest sister's husband. Now aged 16, Huxley entered Sydenham College (behind University College Hospital ), a cut-price anatomy school. All this time Huxley continued his programme of reading, which more than made up for his lack of formal schooling. A year later, buoyed by excellent results and
35712-433: Was made Assistant Surgeon ('surgeon's mate', but in practice marine naturalist) to HMS Rattlesnake , about to set sail on a voyage of discovery and surveying to New Guinea and Australia. The Rattlesnake left England on 3 December 1846 and, once it arrived in the southern hemisphere, Huxley devoted his time to the study of marine invertebrates. He began to send details of his discoveries back to England, where publication
35904-402: Was presented by Lyell and Hooker to the Linnean Society in 1858 alongside excerpts from Darwin's notebook and a Darwin letter to Asa Gray . Huxley's famous response to the idea of natural selection was "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!" However, he never conclusively made up his mind about whether natural selection was the main method for evolution, though he did admit it was
36096-490: Was the kind of thing Darwin did with his closest scientific friends, but he must have had some particular intuition about Huxley, who was by all accounts a most impressive person even as a young man. Huxley was therefore one of the small group who knew about Darwin's ideas before they were published (the group included Joseph Dalton Hooker and Charles Lyell ). The first publication by Darwin of his ideas came when Wallace sent Darwin his famous paper on natural selection, which
36288-675: Was then reinvented in the English-speaking world as a product of the cultural turn of the 1960s, which ushered in structuralist and postmodern approaches to social science. This type of cultural sociology may be loosely regarded as an approach incorporating cultural analysis and critical theory . Cultural sociologists tend to reject scientific methods, instead hermeneutically focusing on words, artifacts and symbols. Culture has since become an important concept across many branches of sociology, including resolutely scientific fields like social stratification and social network analysis . As
36480-434: Was undecided about natural selection , but despite this, he was wholehearted in his public support of Darwin. Instrumental in developing scientific education in Britain, he fought against the more extreme versions of religious tradition. Huxley coined the term " agnosticism " in 1869 and elaborated on it in 1889 to frame the nature of claims in terms of what is knowable and what is not. Huxley had little formal schooling and
36672-426: Was virtually self-taught. He became perhaps the finest comparative anatomist of the later 19th century. He worked on invertebrates , clarifying relationships between groups previously little understood. Later, he worked on vertebrates , especially on the relationship between apes and humans. After comparing Archaeopteryx with Compsognathus , he concluded that birds evolved from small carnivorous dinosaurs ,
36864-507: Was wrong to pitch the loss of orders in the Phanerozoic as low as 7%, and he did not estimate the number of new orders which evolved. Persistent types sat rather uncomfortably next to Darwin's more fluid ideas; despite his intelligence, it took Huxley a surprisingly long time to appreciate some of the implications of evolution. However, gradually Huxley moved away from this conservative style of thinking as his understanding of palaeontology, and
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