An objection to the memetic approach to culture Memetics is one possible evolutionary approach to the study of culture. Boyd and Richerson's models (1985, Boyd this volume), or my epidemiology of representations (1985, 1996), are among other possible evolutionary approaches inspired in various ways by Darwin. The memetic approach is based on the claim that culture is made of memes. If one takes...

The wide adoption of social media has increased the competition among ideas for our finite attention. We employ a parsimonious agent-based model to study whether such a competition may affect the popularity of different memes, the diversity of information we are exposed to, and the fading of our collective interests for specific topics. Agents share messages on a social network but can only pay...

The advent of social media has brought Internet memes, a unique social phenomenon, to the front stage of the Web. Embodied in the form of images with text descriptions, little do we know about the “language of memes”. In this paper, we statistically study the correlations among popular memes and their wordings, and generate meme descriptions from raw images. To do this, we take a multimodal app...

Detecting and characterizing emerging topics of discussion and consumer trends through analysis of Internet data is of great interest to businesses. This paper considers the problem of monitoring the Web to spot emerging memes – distinctive phrases which act as “tracers” for topics – as a means of early detection of new topics and trends. We present a novel methodology for predicting which meme...

Detecting and characterizing emerging topics of discussion and consumer trends through analysis of Internet data is of great interest to businesses. This paper considers the problem of monitoring the Web to spot emerging memes – distinctive phrases which act as “tracers” for topics – as a means of early detection of new topics and trends. We present a novel methodology for predicting which meme...

We report on the first steps towards the automatic generation of Internet memes starring public figures. Their images are retrieved from the Web and combined with famous quotes, altered according to recent information on the figures. Current implementation, in Portuguese, exploits several computational resources and aims to produce artifacts with coherent text, image, and some humor value. A pr...

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...

A "memetic" (Bura 1994, Dennett 1995, Hales 1997) approach is applied to a resource sharing scenario. “Agents" are represented as cells on a grid applying simple cultural learning rules which selectively replicate and repel memes from neighbours. The memes represent culturally learned traits (Axelrod’s 1995) but also influence resource sharing behaviours. In the experiments presented, multiple ...

The "Machiavellian intelligence" hypothesis (or the "social brain" hypothesis) posits that large brains and distinctive cognitive abilities of humans have evolved via intense social competition in which social competitors developed increasingly sophisticated "Machiavellian" strategies as a means to achieve higher social and reproductive success. Here we build a mathematical model aiming to expl...