Equitoxic concentrations of N-methyl-N'-nitro-N-nitrosoguanidine (MNNG) and methyl methanesulfonate (MeMes) produced different frequencies of 8-azaguanine-resistant mutants and different amounts of N7-methylguanine, O6-methylguanine (m6G), and N3-methyladenine in the DNA of V79 Chinese hamster cells. Thus, neither the cytotoxicities nor the mutagenicities of these methylating agents could be at...

A number of recent studies of information diffusion in social media, both empirical and theoretical, have been inspired by viral propagation models derived from epidemiology. These studies model propagation of memes, i.e., pieces of information, between users in a social network similarly to the way diseases spread in human society. Naturally, many of these studies emphasize social exposure, i....

A significantly under-explored area of evolutionary optimization in the literature is the study of optimization methodologies that can evolve along with the problems solved. Particularly, present evolutionary optimization approaches generally start their search from scratch or the ground-zero state of knowledge, independent of how similar the given new problem of interest is to those optimized ...

A simple replication theory of coevolution of genes and memes is proposed. A population composed of couples of genes and memes, the so-called m-genes, is postulated as a subject of Darwinian evolution. Three different types of operations over m-genes are introduced: Replication (an m-gene is replicated with mutations onto an offspring m-gene), interaction (a memetic transfer from a donor to an ...

Darwinian evolution has been the most usual metaphor to design evolutionary algorithms. Nevertheless, some researchers criticize the imperfection of the darwinian metaphor in solving several microbiological phenomena and in modelling evolution of species[1]. Genetic Algorithms, GA, introduced by Holland[6], are based on the darwinian paradigm and are successful in finding approximate solutions ...

My focus in this essay is to illustrate, through a detailed analysis of one particular article, the range of fallacious tactics that are used in attacks against religious faith. This article espouses a characterization of faith as a “mind virus,” more technically called a meme. Before analyzing this article, some brief background on memes seems appropriate. The term meme was first introduced by...

This study explored a method of representing the self graphically using elemental units of culture called memes. A diverse sample of eleven volunteers participated in the co-construction of individual “self-maps” during a series of interviews over a nine month period. Two of the resultant maps are presented as exemplars. Commonalities found in all eleven maps lend support to the notion that the...

How does information behave? A recent controversial approach is to use ideas in evolutionary biology to study the spread of information. However, in order for the information to ‘evolve’, there has to be some mechanism for variation. This paper would explore the ideas of memes which use the evolutionary biology approach as well as the pitfalls in using this picture. Finally, we will focus our a...