Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture

Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker

This paper re-examines the concept of ‘‘meme’’ in the context of digital culture. Defined as cultural units that spread from person to person, memes were debated long before the digital era. Yet the Internet turned the spread of memes into a highly visible practice, and the term has become an integral part of the netizen vernacular. After evaluating the promises and pitfalls of memes for unders...

On Selfish Memes Culture as complex adaptive system

Evolution is ubiquitous. It has become the language of as many as the scientific discussions in our civilization to day. The term was come from biology, explaining how and why we have biological system as we perceive, how our species become the only creatures to which the earth count on her life. But the highest potential in the idea of evolution is not merely in biological systems. The greates...

MHD Memes

The celebration of Allan Kaufman’s 80th birthday was an occasion to reflect on a career that has stimulated the mutual exchange of ideas (or memes in the terminology of Richard Dawkins) between many researchers. This paper will revisit a meme Allan encountered in his early career in magnetohydrodynamics, the continuation of a magnetohydrodynamic mode through a singularity, and will also mention...

Memes Revisited

In this paper, I argue that the adaptive fit between human cultures and their environment is persuasive evidence that some form of evolutionary mechanism has been important in driving human cultural change. I distinguish three mechanisms of cultural evolution: niche construction leading to cultural group selection; the vertical flow of cultural information from parents to their children, and th...

Genes and Memes