Peak meme

I already have an article titled "Peak meme?" - from 2012. However, this time there's no question mark. Here are the stats:

Of course, this article could also prove to be premature. However at the moment it certainly looks as though peak meme was somewhere around January 2020. Around the start of the global pandemic, IOW.

Incidentally, August 2011 is when my book on memes and memetics was published. It was an interesting time for the field.

Memes on The Edge

The term 'meme' is given on the edge home page - www.edge.org - as an example of The Edge 20th Anniversary Annual Question, which is:

WHAT SCIENTIFIC TERM OR CONCEPT OUGHT TO BE MORE WIDELY KNOWN?

It says:

Richard Dawkins' “meme” became a meme, known far beyond the scientific conversation in which it was coined. It’s one of a handful of scientific ideas that have entered the general culture, helping to clarify and inspire.

Apparently they are not saying that 'meme' should be more widely known, but rather asking what other scientific concepts could and should go mainstream - in the way the meme has previously done.

The responses to the annual-question also feature memes in a big way. I counted the occurrences of the term "meme" on the page. It is used 43 times. In some cases it is not just used as a shorthand for "viral internet phenomenon", but for actual discussion of memes in science. It isn't just one contributor using the term 43 times: 12 different people mention memes, as follows:

• Roger Highfield (1)
• Steve Omohundro (8)
• Timothy Taylor (2)
• Stuart Firestein (1)
• Adam Waytz (1)
• David C. Queller (2)
• Melanie Swan (1)
• Paul J. Steinhardt (1)
• Susan Blackmore (2)
• Diana Reiss (1)
• Seth Lloyd (13)
• W. Tecumseh Fitch (10)

This is great. When I got into promoting memetics, the meme was in a moribund state. Since then we've seen a massive explosion of memes on the internet - the 2011 internet meme explosion. I've long believed that the popularity of the term 'meme' is likely to have the effect of forcing the term down scientists' throats. The technical objections to the use of he term by scientists are all bogus ones - based on their own confusions and misunderstandings. This is a case where the wisdom of the crowd has worked out for the best.

The corresponding stats from previous years show that 2017 is a bumper year for "meme" mentions:

• 2017 (43)
• 2016 (4)
• 2015 (8)
• 2014 (8)
• 2013 (7)
• 2012 (6)
• 2011 (25)
• 2010 (7)
• 2009 (19)
• 2007 (14)
• 2006 (11)
• 2005 (0)
• 2004 (1)
• 2003 (2)
• 2002 (7)
• 2001 (1)
• 2000 (0)
• 1999 (7)
• 1998 (0)

One concern about this outpouring of meme enthusiasm is that maybe the meme references in 2017 were't spontaneous. Maybe John Brockman gave "memes" to the respondents as an example.

Population memetics

Just as population genetics is the study of how gene frequencies change in populations, so population memetics is the study of meme frequencies change in populations.

The basis for both fields is frequency analysis - a subject historically associated with cryptanalysis, but more generally a branch of statistics. frequency analysis can be applied to genes, memes, and practically anything else which can be divided into discrete categories for analysis. Much of population memetics consists of data gathering followed by meme frequency analysis.

Population memetics is one of the most studied areas of memetics. It's relatively trivial to measure cultural traits and see how they change and spread through populations over time. Most of the approaches to cultural evolution in academia have been based on ideas derived from population genetics.

Population memetics is involved in harvesting the raw data needed to test most theories in cultural evolution and memetics. Harvesting techniques include questionnaires, and direct observation of behaviour and artifacts - both in the field and in laboratories.

The results of population memetics studies are often visualised using phylomemetic trees.

References

• Lynch, Alejandro Maria, Plunkett, G. M., Baker, A. J., & Jenkins, P. F. (1989) A model of cultural evolution of chaffinch song derived with the meme concept. The American Naturalist, Vol. 133, 634-653.
• Lynch, Alejandro Maria (1991) Cultural evolution in chaffinch song: a population memetics approach.
• Lynch, Alejandro Maria & Baker, A. J. (1993) A population memetics approach to cultural evolution in chaffinch song: Meme divsersity within populations. Am. Nat., Vol. 141, 597-620.
• Lynch, Alejandro Maria (1996b) The Population Memetics of Birdsong. In Ecology and Evolution of Acoustic Communication in Birds, edited by D. E. Kroodsma and E. H. Miller, pp. 181'197. Ithaca.
• Mesoudi, Alex (2011) Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian theory can explain human culture and synthesize the social sciences.
• Richerson, Peter J. and Boyd, Robert (2005) Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution.
• Richerson, Peter J. and Boyd, Robert (2005) The Origin and Evolution of Cultures.
• Richerson, Peter J. and Boyd, Robert (2005) Culture and the Evolutionary Process.
• Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca and Feldman, Marcus W. (1981) Cultural Transmission and Evolution

Memetics on Google Scholar

Following up on my last blog post, I checked Google Scholar on "Memetics".

This is an update on my "Memetics death report exaggerated" article - from 2008.

Google Scholar shows the following growth for memetics papers:

Growth in "memetics" papers over time

Compared to "cultural evolution", memetics shows similar growth, but starting later and with significantly less popularity.

Genetics is less popular than evolution too - but by less than 2:1. However memeticsis less popular than cultural evolution by more than 5:1. Even after accounting for the lack of interest in cultural evolution, memetics is an under-studied area.

Here's my graph data:

1985 - 1 1986 - 1 1987 - 3 1988 - 2 1989 - 3

1990 - 6 1991 - 3 1992 - 7 1993 - 3 1994 - 7 1995 - 16 1996 - 32 1997 - 43 1998 - 103 1999 - 126

2000 - 126 2001 - 206 2002 - 234 2003 - 225 2004 - 284 2005 - 313 2006 - 346 2007 - 469 2008 - 484 2009 - 557

2010 - 628 2011 - 731 2012 - 488 2013 - 90

Here's last year's plot.

Graph of memetics articles on Google Scholar

Richard Dawkins proposed tracking the health of memetics by tracking citations of the idea in learned journals - in the second edition of The Selfish Gene.

I plotted such references in a 2008 article titled: Memetics death report exaggerated.

I revisited Google Scholar and made another plot today. This time I used "memetic OR memetics" as my search term, which seems to be the most reasonable thing to search for to me.

Here are the results:

As before, it is best to ignore the last couple of years: Google hasn't indexed all the papers from those years yet.

This time I also did a "control" plot: I searched for "gold":

Here's my raw data:

Year Memetics 1990 15 1991 14 1992 24 1993 28 1994 40 1995 50 1996 70 1997 93 1998 187 1999 264 2000 303 2001 408 2002 538 2003 648 2004 819 2005 1010 2006 1220 2007 1460 2008 1800 2009 2020 2010 2580 2011 2570 2012 42

Year Gold 1990 102000 1991 113000 1992 123000 1993 133000 1994 147000 1995 172000 1996 188000 1997 211000 1998 242000 1999 277000 2000 304000 2001 304000 2002 349000 2003 374000 2004 418000 2005 428000 2006 373000 2007 372000 2008 300000 2009 257000 2010 164000 2011 110000 2012 7660

Others on the internet seem to be noticing downturns in recent years too. For example, this guy appears to have concluded that we are at "peak haplotype" - on similarly flimsy evidence.

Many Eyes - data visualization tool

IBM's "Many Eyes" can make some pretty cool data visualizations. It's a crowdsourced version of Information Is Beautiful.

Some examples, oriented towards social media: Facebook visualisations | Twitter visualisations.

As a visual example, the following graphs show how the top 10 girls names, and the top 10 boys names change over time.

Check out how the girl's names appear to go "out of fashion" more quickly!

Stats on memetics vs cultural evolution

I thought it would be interesting to attempt to quantify how memetics and cultural evolution are doing on the internet, relative to each other:

One methodology is to apply Google search statistics to their terminology:

Alas, most of their terms typically don't have enough volume to allow the use of Google Insights for Search. However I can do this:

...and this:

In other cases, I'll have to use static figures.

Memetics	Count	Cultural evolution	Count
"memetic drift"	9,230	"cultural drift"	53,500
"meme"	56,900,000	"cultural variant"	10,600
"memetics"	756,000	"cultural evolution"	1,020,000

Of course, science is more than just a populatity contest - and there are about a million other ways in which this methodology is limited.

Facebook persists with their "memology" nonsense

I told Facebook this time last year that the study of memes is not called "memology".

Yet still they persist with their nonsense. Oh well. Their video is above. Their "memology" page is here.

An engineer claims that things like the death of Steve Jobs, Amy Winehouse and Gadaffi are not down to a "viral effect" - whereas status updates such as "like my status" are - because the deaths are current affairs events that people just happen to be simultaneously talking about. That seems to be a confused perspective, it seems to me. Both spread in a similar "epidemiological" manner. It would be reasonable to classify meme "virality" according to whether the content was deleterious to its host or not - but surely not like this.

The gene-meme crossover point

Memes have become as popular as genes on the internet this month.

Genes have been overtaken in popularity! This is a historic moment!

In the plural, now "memes" have overtaken "genes" too:

2011 - year of the meme!

Following up on my previous blog post regarding the popularity of the term "meme", it appears that 2011 may be the year of the meme!

The latest Google Trends results for "meme" are pretty spectacular:

History of "Meme" searches (with news information)

Here are the current Google Trends results for "memes":

History of "Memes" searches (with news information)

Web search (memes):

Image search (memes):

Web search (meme):

Image search (meme):

I am pleased. The term "meme" has gone viral! Memes appear to have a bright future.

Also, I seem to have chosen a good time to publish a book on the subject.

Note: 2010 was also declared to be the year of the meme.

Note: this article describes a confounding factor when searching for "memes".

---

Footnotes:

Some more data:

History of "Meme" searches (cleaned up search data, but with no news)

History of "Memes" searches (cleaned up search data, but with no news)

History of "Meme" searches in the last year ((cleaned up search data, but with no news)

History of "Memes" searches in the last year (cleaned up search data, but with no news)

Lastly, the NYT search facility offers some news volume information. The following data was gathered from the NYT on 2011-11-29.

Memes since 1851: 4660.
Memes in the last 12 months: 2860.
Memes in the last 3 months: 1970.

Rising trends - from Google

Google Insights for Search has some nice trend-spotting tools. It identifies rapidly-rising search terms. Here are a few examples:

BlogPulse - blog trend tracking tool

BlogPulse is another trend monitoring tool, tracking blogs.

Sample output can be seen here.

Trendistic - track twitter trends

Trendistic is a popular Twitter trends site. Here is a sample:

Here's their list of current hot topics.

Google Ngram Viewer

Google have released their Ngram Viewer - which allows sequences of up to five words to be tracked in their enormous database of scanned books.





Here are some more sample searches.

The tool seems likely to be a useful one for students of cultural evolution.

Memology is not a word!

Facebook have recently been attempting to coin a new term, "memology".

They define "memology" here as follows:

"Memology" refers to the study of how "memes," or new ideas and trends, are spreading on Facebook.

Sorry, Facebook, "memology" is not a word. It is an attempt at marketing - and one of those nasty ones that pollutes the language.

Google Insights for Search

Following up on my previous blog post regarding the popularity of the term "meme", Google has now launched Google Insights for Search.

This new tool lets you do many things that Google trends never did.

Without further ado, here's a static snapshot of the graph for "meme":

...and here's the graph for "memes":

However, now here's the graph for "memetic":

...and here's the graph for "memetics":

While memes are doing well, the science of memes is not. Sad times.

Anyway, Google Insights for Search is also a great new way for tracking meme trends - for those who are interested in that sort of thing.

The rise of the meme

"Meme" is by far the most popular name for a contagious idea.

Today, the Memetic Explosion continues to gather pace. In fact, memes are exploding!

Here is a graph from Google Trends which illustrates its progress so far:

History of "Meme" searches [Current image]

History of "Meme" searches [Current image]

Archived images - from 2010:

History of "Meme" searches [December 2010]

History of "Meme" searches [source]