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 greatest role of the theories is now explaining the dynamic of our society and culture. The paper presents a still working of evolutionary process we are going on, and how cultures become selfish in order to sustain human living above earth: memetics. There have been a lot of discussions about the definition of memetics and how useful it is to the social analysis on explaining the social evolution (Sartika, 2004). The inventor of the term, Richard Dawkins (1976), coined the term in the motivation of seeing the cultural evolution in the sense of natural selection – a usual and sound way of thinking as the works on “culturgen” (Cavalli-Sforza, 1986), to see the cultural evolution by using the perspectives in genetics. Dawkins defined the term as Abstract We present the formal definition of meme in the sense of the equivalence between memetics and the theory of cultural evolution. From the formal definition we find that culture can be seen analytically and persuade that memetic gives important role in the exploration of sociological theory, especially in the cultural studies. We show that we are not allowed to assume meme as smallest information unit in cultural evolution in general, but it is the smallest information we use on explaining cultural evolution. We construct a computational model and do simulation in advance presenting the selfish meme power-law distributed. The simulation result shows that the contagion of meme as well as cultural evolution is a complex adaptive system. Memetics is the system and art of importing genetics to social sciences.