The episode begins with the boys attempting to get a photo of Cartman "Faith Hilling" (making pretend boobies with your shirt) at a Republican debate.
It continues with planking, owling, Bradying, Tebowing, and "Taylor Swifting" - a curiously-named meme which involves pulling your pants down and rubbing your butt along the ground like a dog. There's also a meme involving shoving a cat's head through a slice of bread and a meme called "Oh Long Johnsoning". There's also a public service announcement about memes (featured above) - which features the catchy tagline:
Use the approved poses if you wanna be a memer. Peace sign, bunny ears, fake wiener.
The idea of "fake wiener" is not at all new - but the specific photographic pose illustrated seems to be largely South Park's invention.
The blurb for the episode reads:
Mankind's evolution begins to accelerate at a rapid and disturbing pace. Concurrently, another species on the planet is exhibiting the same drastic development. Eventually the two species will battle to the death and Faith Hilling may be humanity's only hope.
The whole episode is pretty good. It's also a reasonable advert for memes and memetics. It features a consultation with a meme expert who goes into the history and theory of memes a little (8:30). Here's the specific bit:
The expert has a book apparently called "Memes through the Ages" - or something like that. It traces meme history back through "Fonzying", "mustaching", "Poodle Fisting", "Ass Wedging" and "Donkey Dicking". The book has some funny stuff in it - for example, it says:
In his book "The historical significance of Fonzy", Richard Dawkins states, "Fonzying showed a giant leap forwards in human intelligence because it was a very simple meme..."
I don't want to supply too many spoliers, but just to say it is a suprisingly worthwhile 20 minutes - assuming that you are interested in memes.
Here's a "Taylor Swifting video". It was uploaded before the episode aired - and so is probably part of an online publicity campaign. Of course after the episode many uploaded their own Taylor Swifting attempts.
The episode seems to have been somewhat successful in launching both "Faith Hilling" and "Taylor Swifting" memes on the unsuspecting world. "Taylor Swifting" seems to be a reference to Taylor Swift's existing undesirable meme fame at the VMA award ceremony - which we covered here. "Faith Hilling" is presumably a reference to Faith Hill's Stepford Wives breast growth scene.
After this episode, being "Taylor Swifted" now seems to be a pretty reasonable term for unsolicited fame that involves embarassment, grossness or other high negativity.
The rather obvious terms "memer" and "memeing" seem to have had a rather low frequency before the broadcast of this episode. I expect they will become more widely used in the future.
The last South Park "internet meme" episode was Canada on Strike.
The late William Hamilton - an evolutionary biology superstar - was a meme enthusiast from the early days. In 1977 he correctly predicted that the term would come to dominate - writing:
He floats the term "meme" (short for mimeme) for the cultural equivalent of "gene". Hard as this term may be to delimit - it surely must be harder than gene, which is bad enough - I suspect that it will soon be in common use by biologists and, one hopes, by philosophers, linguists, and others as well and that it may become absorbed as far as the word “gene” has been into everyday speech.
His "Narrow Roads of Gene Land" volumes mention memes at numerous points. Here he is in one of the introductions in "Narrow Roads of Gene Land, Volume 2: Evolution of Sex" from 2002:
Quite possibly new memes that we are creating and are themselves vigorously 'Darwinizing' and thus self-improving may acquire strength to take us over almost completely, much in the way that a brain worm takes over behaviour in an ant. Whenever a weakness in the meme-acceptance system has been discovered there still seems little to stop this happening, at least within an individual lifetime.
And what then is the written word? My basis theory is that the written word was literally a virus that made spoken word possible. The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host...(This symbiotic relationship is now breaking down for reasons I will suggest later.)
...and...
I have frequently spoken of word and image as viruses or as acting as viruses, and this is not an allegorical comparison. It will be seen that the falsifications of syllabic western languages are in point of fact actual virus mechanisms. The IS of identity the purpose of a virus is to SURVIVE. To survive at any expense to the host invaded.
Virus, symbiosis, it not being an analogy - he even talks about "taking the virus eye view" at one point.
Even eariler we had this - from "The Ticket That Exploded" (1962):
From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may once have been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the lungs. The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.
A little later came this - from the essay Ten years and a billion dollars - reprinted in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (1985):
My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute. But the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of a virus: it's an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself.
William Burroughs seems to have grasped a fair chunk of the essence of memetics in these paragraphs - and he did so quite early on. A case of art and science meeting, perhaps.
LOLSpeak is a dialect of English that appears to be largely associated with image macros. It features shortened and often misspelled words.
Abbreviation
Like the abbreviations used in mobile phone text messages, instant messages and emails, LOLSpeak is abbreviated. Because space in image macros is limited, LOLSpeak is often highly abbreviated.
Function
LOLSpeak apparently exists to make image macros more surprising, fun - and more shareable.
LOLSpeak sometimes acts like a cultural tag that marks the sender as part of a "cool" net-savvy in-group.
LOLSpeak represents an interesting example of an English subdialect evolving. There's an interesting thesis about the evolution of LOLSpeak.
Universal Darwinism is the idea that Darwinism is a broadly applicable theory - which applies to organic biology, but also applies to culture, development, the brain - and many systems beyond the organic realm.
Darwin's theory of evolution is substrate-neutral. Darwin himself recognized this - and included passages to that effect in "The Descent of Man", saying that:
The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
The Wikipedia page on Universal Darwinism gives a long list of fields to which Darwin's theory of evolution has been applied. It ranges from the social sciences through complex adaptive systems to some much more speculative ideas - such as the idea that the visible cosmos itself evolved.
Memetics and cultural evolution represent Universal Darwinism applied to human culture.
Scope
Though Darwinism has historically been largely confined to biology, Universal Darwinism represents a massive expansion of its domain - into the social sciences, ontogeny and beyond: into physics, chemistry and systems theory. Position, velocity, mass, charge and many other physical attributes are all copied with variation and selection.
History
The idea was first expressed in modern times by Donald Campbell. One of the best histories of the idea comes from Henry Plotkin's book "Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge". In the book, Plotkin repurposed the term "Universal Darwinism", assigning it its modern usage. He traces the idea from Darwin, Huxley, Piaget, Campbell and Popper before getting on to the topic of natural selection within the immune system and the nervous system.
Universality
Some (e.g. Geoffrey Hodgson) have questioned the "universality" of Universal Darwinism - saying that life is confined to our planet - and that the term "Generalised Darwinism" would be more appropriate. I think that "Degenerative Darwinism" - which applies Darwin's theory to fractures, ripples, crystals and other commonplace adaptive systems which are not "advanced" enough to exhibit cumulative adaptation - justifies use of the term "universal Darwinism". It does this without recourse to controversial ideas about black holes, quantum physics, or biologically-derived evolving systems, like culture, technology or modern computer systems.
History of the term
Richard Dawkins appears to have coined the term "Universal Darwinism" in 1983 to describe the conjecture that any possible life forms existing outside the solar system would necessarily evolve by Darwinian means.
Henry Plotkin's 1997 book "Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge" had a chapter titled "Universal Darwinism". This redefined the term to refer to broader forms of evolution - specifically evolution within organisms (the immune system and learning) rather than between organisms.
Susan Blackmore, in her 1999 book The Meme Machine, also has a chapter titled "Universal Darwinism". This discusses applying Darwinism to a broad range of phenomena - including human culture.
Incompleteness
"Universal Darwinism" is a very general theory. To make detailed predictions in specific cases, it typically depends on other theories. It is thus like a framework on which other, more specific theories are based. It has 'spaces' for theories of:
Mutation;
Selection criteria;
Recombination;
Development.
These elements are typically treated as pluggable black boxes by the theory - though there are typically constraints on what can be plugged in (for example, a mutation can't be allowed to be any possible change).
Much of the debate over the utility of Universal Darwinism has taken place within economics - one of the first social sciences to take Darwinism seriously. However, economics has proved to be a myopic context in which to criticize the theory, with many critics getting out of their depth and struggling to understand the topic.
Criticism
"Universal Darwinism" is a highly-criticized subject. It hasn't attracted as much heat as cultural evolution, memetics, or evolutionary psychology, but there are still many critics with a lot of different issues. Probably the single most important thing to say about the critics is that they are mistaken. However some of them do highlight genuine issues with the theory.
Probably the single most important criticism is that "Universal Darwinism" is mistaken because copying with variation and selection is not a scientific theory - since it is compatible with all observations and so is irrefutable. Levit, Hossfeld and Witt (2010) present this criticism in more detail. NeoDarwinism avoids this criticism since it claims that mutations are 'random' (in a bizarre technical sense of the word). However in Universal Darwinism, mutations are merely 'blind' (in a bizarre technical sense of the word due to Donald Campbell). This both weaker, harder to explain and more confusing, which leads critics to this objection.
A weaker version of this criticism is that "Universal Darwinism" constrains expectations only weakly - and so isn't very useful. However, applying weak constraints is still better than not applying constraints at all.
Speculative extensions
Some applications of Darwinism are pretty speculative. The idea that the visible universe is an adaptation - by James Gardner and Lee Smolin - is one example of this. These speculative aspects of universal Darwinism should not be used to detract from those that are hard science.
D. B. Kelly has written The Origin of Everything via Universal Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Systems in Contention for Existence. There's an associated web site.
Aldrich , Howard E., Hodgson, Geoffrey M., Hull, David L., Knudsen, Thorbjørn, Mokyr, Joel and Vanberg, Viktor J. (2008) In defence of generalized Darwinism.
Amundson, Ronald (1989) The trials and tribulations of selectionist explanations.In K. Hahlweg & C. A. Hooker (Eds.), Issues in evolutionary epistemology (pp. 413-432). Albany: State University of New York Press. [criticism]
Campbell, Donald T. (1974b) Unjustified variation and selective retention in scientific discovery.In F J. Ayala & T. Dobzhansky (Eds.), Studies in the philosophy of biology (pp. 139-161). London: Macmillan.
Campbell, Donald T. (1977) Comment on Robert J. Richard's "The natural selection model of conceptual evolution."Philosophy of Science, 44, 502-507.
Campbell, Donald T. (1988) A general 'selection theory' as implemented in biological evolution and in social belief-transmission-with-modification in science [A commentary on Hull]. Biology and Philosophy, 3, 171-177.
Campbell, Donald T., Lanham, M.D. (1990) Epistemological roles for selection theory.In N. Rescher (Ed.), Evolution, cognition, and realism: Studies in evolutionary epistemology (pp. 1-19). University Press of America.
Kary, K. (1982) Can Darwinian inheritance be extended from biology to epistemology? In P.D. Asquith & T. Nickles (eds.), PSA 1982, Volume 1. East Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association Press, pp. 356-369.
Wuketits, Franz M. (1984) Evolutionary epistemology: A challenge to science and philosophy. In F. M. Wuketits (Ed.), Concepts and approaches in evolutionary epistemology (pp. 1-29). Dordrecht & Boston: Reidel.
Darwin himself understood that culture evolves - writing in 1871:
The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
The passage this quote comes from is of historical interest. Here it is in full:
The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and
the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process,
are curiously parallel. But we can trace the formation of many
words further back than that of species, for we can perceive how
they actually arose from the imitation of various sounds. We find in
distinct languages striking homologies due to community of descent,
and analogies due to a similar process of formation. The manner in
which certain letters or sounds change when others change is very like
correlated growth. We have in both cases the re-duplication of
parts, the effects of long-continued use, and so forth. The frequent
presence of rudiments, both in languages and in species, is still more
remarkable. The letter m in the word am, means I; so that in the
expression I am, a superfluous and useless rudiment has been retained.
In the spelling also of words, letters often remain as the rudiments
of ancient forms of pronunciation. Languages, like organic beings, can
be classed in groups under groups; and they can be classed either
naturally according to descent, or artificially by other characters.
Dominant languages and dialects spread widely, and lead to the gradual
extinction of other tongues. A language, like a species, when once
extinct, never, as Sir C. Lyell remarks, reappears. The same
language never has two birth-places. Distinct languages may be crossed
or blended together. We see variability in every tongue, and new
words are continually cropping up; but as there is a limit to the
powers of the memory, single words, like whole languages, gradually
become extinct. As Max Muller has well remarked:- "A struggle
for life is constantly going on amongst the words and grammatical
forms in each language. The better, the shorter, the easier forms
are constantly gaining the upper hand, and they owe their success to
their own inherent virtue." To these more important causes of the
survival of certain words, mere novelty and fashion may be added;
for there is in the mind of man a strong love for slight changes in
all things. The survival or preservation of certain favoured words
in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
We're in a mass extinction event just now. Languages are going extinct as well as organic creatures. However, what you may not have known is that English words are going extinct too - according to the following study:
While the differences between memes and genes are interesting, I find that too much emphasis on the differences causes people to prematurely reject memetics - and then miss out on all its valuable aspects. So, I'm a little concerned that Razib may be inadvertently contributing to this problem.
Razib pointed out that gradual migration tends to result in the migrants adopting the memes of their new home - while their genes tended to survive the transition much better.
Someone who is sincerely looking for the corresponding area of genetics, should consider the genes in symbionts (parasites or mutualists) - not the genes in the humans. That is because cultural creatures (with memetic heredity) are much more like parasites and mutualists than they are like their human hosts.
So: do gradual human migrants pick up the colds, flus, tics, lice and bed bugs of their new home? Do they adopt the berries, grains and livestock of their new homeland? In some cases you'll find that the answer is "yes".
Also in the cultural case, sometimes the corresponding answer is "no". Consider the "surname" memes - they typically manage to survive the transition intact. Or imagine an inventor - some of their memes may survive and thrive in the new ecosystem - almost as if they had brought across a potent new viral strain.
From this broader perspective, memes and genes turn out not to look so very different. The dissimilarity arose from considering one type of meme and one type of gene. If you are considering memes that spread horizontally between hosts, the appropriate point of comparison is genes that spread horizontally between hosts - e.g. the genes in viruses.
Epidemiology dealls with the spread of health-related phenomena through populations. These could be pathogen-borne illnesses, poisonings, work-related illnesses, or a range of other health-related events.
Many traits that spread are the result of some kind symbiosis. Pathogens spread through populations - but so do mutualists - such as the relationship between humans and various kinds of fruit and vegetable. Humans also have mutualistic relationships with a variety of decorative and medicinal plants.
Other traits that spread through populations are cultural traits. These can usefully be seen as being cultural symbionts. Fads, fashions, and trends spread through populations much like plagues and viruses do. They too spread like epidemics and plagues - and have their own epidemic threshold.
Other types of phenomena spread as well - for example radioactive fallout, sunburn and frostbite.
However, not all of the phenomena that spread are particularly health related. Currently the fields of mutualisms and memetics borrow heavily from the terminology of epidemiology to describe the dynamics of the systems they study. It seems desirable to generalise epidemiology to cover all traits.
So, here we propose generalised epidemiology - the science that studies how traits spread through populations - irrespective of whether the traits are related to health.
This field differs from demography through its focus on change - and through not being confined to humans.
A similar coinage is infodemiology. One paper claims:
Infodemiology can be defined as the science of distribution and determinants of information in an electronic medium, specifically the Internet, or in a population, with the ultimate aim to inform public health and public policy.
That's a pretty duff definition, but the word could work. Generalised epidemiology is intended to cover infodemiology and epidemiology. However, "infodemiology" may be more of a rival term - and it is a bit of a shame that the first stab at it didn't cover the general case.
It is proposed that use of the term "epidemiology" to refer only to health traits should eventually be deprecated, allowing the term "epidemiology" be reassigned to refer to the concept of generalised epidemiology described here. This proposal is supported by the etymology of the word "epidemiology" - which says that it means, roughly speaking: "what is on the people".
The late William Hamilton - an evolutionary biology superstar - was a meme enthusiast from the early days. In 1977 he correctly predicted that the term would come to dominate - writing:
In 1970, William Burroughs wrote "
Darwin himself understood that culture evolves - writing in 1871:
We're in a mass extinction event just now. Languages are going extinct as well as organic creatures. However, what you may not have known is that English words are going extinct too - according to the following study:
On his blog, Razib Khan once wrote about 
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