Applications
This is a collection of books related to the topic of applications of memetics. The list is associated with my 2011 "Memetics" book - which is now available. For the main list of memetics books, see here.
 | Memetics: Memes and the Science of Cultural Evolution by Tim Tyler (2011)
Memetics is the name commonly given to the study of memes - a term originally coined by Richard Dawkins to describe small inherited elements of human culture. Memes are the cultural equivalent of DNA genes - and memetics is the cultural equivalent of genetics. Memes have become ubiquitous in the modern world - but there has been relatively little proper scientific study of how they arise, spread and change - apparently due to turf wars within the social sciences and misguided resistance to Darwinian explanations being applied to human behaviour. However, with the modern explosion of internet memes, I think this is bound to change. With memes penetrating into every mass media channel, and with major companies riding on their coat tails for marketing purposes, social scientists will surely not be able to keep the subject at arm's length for much longer. This will be good - because an understanding of memes is important. View on Google Books the book page, the author page, or the book contents. |
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| Image | Title, author, date and description |
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| Evolutionary Epistemology |
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| Evolutionary Archaeology |
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 | Genes, Memes and Human History: Darwinian Archaeology and Cultural Evolution by Stephen Shennan (2003)
What is the history of human populations? How are cultural traditions maintained and changed over time? Why did people destroy their environments in the past and were they ever conservationists? What led to the emergence of marked social inequalities? These are some of the questions that this text addresses and answers, in an application of neo-Darwinian evolutionary ideas to the human past. Stephen Shennan opens with the study of human behaviour, as acted upon by natural selection, and goes on to demonstrate that the same ideas can be applied to human societies, not just through the genes but through what Richard Dawkins has called 'memes', units of cultural information which are passed on in our second inheritance system, culture. The book ranges from life history theory to game theory, and from the origins of farming to the collapse of societies. View on Google Books the book page, the author page, or the book contents. |
| | Evolutionary historical and sociological studies |
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| Evolutionary Linguistics |
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| Evolutionary Religious Studies |
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 | Religovirology: Meme Mechanics, Virology of Religion, and Refutation of Supernaturalism by Eric Bright (2009)
It is all about modeling. This time the model is invented to explain religion. One way of studying religions is to refer to the theological literature. The other way is studying religion as the subject of another science. In this context, we can scrutinize religion and reveal its internal mechanics in a meta-language. To do so, first we need to know why religion can be studied scientifically and why it is not untouchable. Trying to be as objective as human beings can be, we begin to see that religions behave in a way very familiar to biologists. There are organisms that behave in the same way, namely viruses. The similarity was first noted by Richard Dawkins in about 1976. I try to elaborate on that and see if a new science can emerge from Dawkins' 'dangerous idea.' Should that work, then we have started a new era of the demystification of religion. The resulting attempts will give birth to what I call Religovirology (read re.li.go.virology). View on Google Books the book page, the author page, or the book contents. |
| | Evolutionary Economics |
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| Leadership |
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| Cooperation |
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| Evolutionary Morality |
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| Evolutionary innovation |
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| Technological evolution |
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| Evolutionary Musicology |
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 | The Memetics of Music by Steven Jan (2007)
Richard Dawkins' formulation of the meme concept in his 1976 classic 'The Selfish Gene' has inspired three decades of work in what many see as the burgeoning science of memetics. Its underpinning theory proposes that human culture is composed of a multitude of particulate units, memes, which are analogous to the genes of biological transmission. These cultural replicators are transmitted by imitation between members of a community and are subject to mutational-evolutionary pressures over time. Despite Dawkins and several others using music in their exemplifications of what might constitute a meme, these formulations have generally been quite rudimentary, even naive. This study is the first musicologically-orientated attempt systematically to apply the theory of memetics to music. View on Google Books the book page, the author page, or the book contents. |
| | Evolutionary Learning and Creativity |
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| Evolutionary Marketing |
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 | Guerrilla Creativity: Make Your Message Irresistible with the Power of Memes by Jay Conrad Levinson (2001)
Today, with more than four thousand marketing messages assailing consumers daily, it is more important than ever to create an original, appealing, and memorable message. Marketer extraordinaire Jay Conrad Levinson shows readers how to craft such messages using memes - simple symbols that represent complex ideas. Memes can be words, such as Lean Cuisine or 'Remember the Alamo,' or they can be images, such as the Red Cross or Betty Crocker. They can even be actions, like drenching a victorious coach with a barrelful of Gatorade. The best memes can propel a product or service to the pinnacle of success. As no other book has done before, Guerrilla Creativity shows how even someone who doesn't consider himself creative can make memes that work. Using a variety of examples of memes both good and bad, Levinson guides readers step by step through the process of fashioning marketing materials that result in increased sales, savings, market share, and profits. View on Google Books the book page, the author page, or the book contents. |
| | Memetic self-help |
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 | Disinfect Your Mind: Defend Yourself with Memetics Against Mass Media, Politicians, Corporate Management, Your Aunt's Advice, and Other Mind Viruses by Ely Asher (2006)
While authorities in psychology discuss whether memetics is a science, its use by politicians, marketing departments and mass media becomes more and more ubiquitous. Consider a computer. You can only use a word processor to edit a text. You can only use a merchant's website to order merchandize. But you can use programming languages like C++ or C# to make a computer do virtually anything you want. Similarly, psychology is not enough anymore for politicians, mass media, and large businesses. Preinstalled programs in human minds, such as widely accepted social norms, habits, and prejudices, are not enough for them to exploit anymore. They want to make you do virtually anything they want you to do. View on Google Books the book page, the author page, or the book contents. |
|  | Everyday Magic: The Power of Memes by Ken Renshaw (2004)
Change your memes: Change your life. Memes are learned attitudes or behaviors, decisions and beliefs. They determine the Everyday Magic in our life, the way things flow. Life can be easy with everything magically turning out the way we wish. Life can be difficult, a struggle. It all depends on the memes you hold. This book shows you how to systematically examine and understand your memes and life pattern to change your Everyday Magic. View on Google Books the book page, the author page, or the book contents. |
| | Non-human animal culture |
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| Memetic Algorithms |
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 | Multi-Objective Memetic Algorithms by Chi-Keong Goh, Yew-Soon Ong and Kay Chen Tan (2009)
The application of sophisticated evolutionary computing approaches for solving complex problems with multiple conflicting objectives in science and engineering have increased steadily in the recent years. Within this growing trend, Memetic algorithms are, perhaps, one of the most successful stories, having demonstrated better efficacy in dealing with multi-objective problems as compared to its conventional counterparts. Nonetheless, researchers are only beginning to realize the vast potential of multi-objective Memetic algorithm and there remain many open topics in its design. This book presents a very first comprehensive collection of works, written by leading researchers in the field, and reflects the current state-of-the-art in the theory and practice of multi-objective Memetic algorithms. 'Multi-Objective Memetic algorithms' is organized for a wide readership and will be a valuable reference for engineers, researchers, senior undergraduates and graduate students who are interested in the areas of Memetic algorithms and multi-objective optimization. View on Google Books the book page, the author page, or the book contents. |
|  | Recent Advances in Memetic Algorithms by William E. Hart, Natalio Krasnogor and J. E. Smith (2005)
Memetic algorithms are evolutionary algorithms that apply a local search process to refine solutions to hard problems. Memetic algorithms are the subject of intense scientific research and have been successfully applied to a multitude of real-world problems ranging from the construction of optimal university exam timetables, to the prediction of protein structures and the optimal design of space-craft trajectories. This monograph presents a rich state-of-the-art gallery of works on memetic algorithms. Recent Advances in Memetic Algorithms is the first book that focuses on this technology as the central topical matter. This book gives a coherent, integrated view on both good practice examples and new trends including a concise and self-contained introduction to memetic algorithms. It is a necessary read for postgraduate students and researchers interested in recent advances in search and optimization technologies based on memetic algorithms, but can also be used as complement to undergraduate textbooks on artificial intelligence. View on Google Books the book page, the author page, or the book contents. |
|  | Handbook of Memetic Algorithms (Studies in Computational Intelligence) by Ferrante Neri, Carlos Cotta and Pablo Moscato (Editors) (2010)
Memetic Algorithms (MAs) are computational intelligence structures combining multiple and various operators in order to address optimization problems. The combination and interaction amongst operators evolves and promotes the diffusion of the most successful units and generates an algorithmic behavior which can handle complex objective functions and hard fitness landscapes. “Handbook of Memetic Algorithms” organizes, in a structured way, all the the most important results in the field of MAs since their earliest definition until now. A broad review including various algorithmic solutions as well as successful applications is included in this book. Each class of optimization problems, such as constrained optimization, multi-objective optimization, continuous vs combinatorial problems, uncertainties, are analysed separately and, for each problem, memetic recipes for tackling the difficulties are given with some successful examples. Although this book contains chapters written by multiple authors, a great attention has been given by the editors to make it a compact and smooth work which covers all the main areas of computational intelligence optimization. It is not only a necessary read for researchers working in the research area, but also a useful handbook for practitioners and engineers who need to address real-world optimization problems. In addition, the book structure makes it an interesting work also for graduate students and researchers is related fields of mathematics and computer science. |
|  | Swarm, Evolutionary, and Memetic Computing: First International Conference on Swarm, Evolutionary, and Memetic Computing, SEMCCO 2010 by Bijaya Ketan Panigrahi, Swagatam Das, Ponnuthurai Nagaratnam Suganthan and Subhransu Sekhar Dash (2011)
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Swarm, Evolutionary, and Memetic Computing, SEMCCO 2010, held in Chennai, India, in December 2010. The 86 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 225 submissions. View on Google Books the book page, the author page, or the book contents. |
|  | Distributed Memetic Algorithms for Graph-Theoretical Combinatorial Optimization Problems by Thomas Fischer (2009)
In this thesis, three different graph-theoretical combinatorial optimization problems have been addressed by memetic and distributed algorithms. These three problems include the well-known 'Travelling Salesman Problem' (TSP) and the two communication problems 'Optimum Communication Spanning Tree Problem' (OCST) and 'Routing and Wavelength Assignment Problem' (RWA). The focus of the research presented in this thesis was on developing techniques to handle large instances of the above problems, where 'large' refers to problem sizes larger than those addressed in related works or large enough to pose a challenge for state-of-the-art heuristic solvers. For the TSP, a large number of publications and algorithms are available, so here research centers on how to solve large problem instances either by reducing the size of problem instances by fixing edges of a problem instance or by distributing the computation in sets of cluster nodes. For the OCST, a given local search algorithm was modified to handle large problem instances. The new local search algorithm was embedded into a distributed memetic algorithm with problem-specific recombination operators. For the RWA, most components of a distributed memetic algorithm were developed for this thesis, including local search, recombination, and distribution. To handle large problem instances, the algorithm was enhanced by a multilevel component to reduce the problem size. View on Google Books the book page, the author page, or the book contents. |
| | Anthropogeny (Human Evolution) |
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| Synergy |
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| Misc |
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 | Genes, Memes, Culture, and Mental Illness: Toward an Integrative Model by Hoyle Leigh (2010)
What produces mental illness: genes, environment, both, neither? The answer can be found in memes - replicable units of information linking genes and environment in the memory and in culture whose effects on individual brain development can be benign or toxic. This book reconceptualizes mental disorders as products of stressful gene-meme interactions and introduces a biopsychosocial template for meme-based diagnosis and treatment. A range of therapeutic modalities, both broad-spectrum (meditation) and specific (cognitive-behavioral), for countering negative memes and their replication are considered, as are possibilities for memetic prevention strategies. In this book, the author outlines the roles of genes and memes in the evolution of the human brain; elucidates the creation, storage, and evolution of memes within individual brains; examines culture as a carrier and supplier of memes to the individual; provides examples of gene-meme interactions that can result in anxiety, depression, and other disorders; proposes a multiaxial gene-meme model for diagnosing mental illness; identifies areas of meme-based prevention for at-risk children; and defines specific syndromes in terms of memetic symptoms, genetic/ memetic development, and meme-based treatment. View on Google Books the book page, the author page, or the book contents. |
|  | How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Cultural Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century by Michael D. C. Drout (2006)
How Tradition Works examines the ways traditions are created, constituted, modified, and recognized. Expanding and revising "memetic" theory, the book analyzes the culture of the tenth-century English Benedictine Reform. How Tradition Works shows how this flowering of culture can be traced to the reliance by Anglo-Saxon monks upon unchanging written rules, the Rule of St. Benedict and the Regularis Concordia. The book also examines the corpus of Old English wills, the Old English Rule of Chrodegang, and the "wisdom poems" of the Exeter Book. This interdisciplinary study is valuable for specialists in evolutionary theory and memetics, Anglo-Saxon studies, and scholars interested in Oral Traditional Theory. How Tradition Works provides researchers with new methodological tools as well as showing how these tools can work to untangle the intricacies of cultural change and stasis. View on Google Books the book page, the author page, or the book contents. |
|  | Understanding Suicide Terrorism from a Cultural and Memetic Perspective by David Wiklanski (2008)
The problem of Suicide Terrorism is not a new phenomenon. In fact, its roots can be traced back to the days of the Knights Templar. The modern day manifestation of this brand of terrorism, the suicide bomber, has been seen frequently throughout Sri Lanka as well as many other global hot spots. But what causes an individual to sacrifice their life and become a human bomb? There are several reasons for this phenomena, which are explored in this work. View on Google Books the book page, the author page, or the book contents. |
|  | |  | Living on A Meme: How Anti-Corporate Activists Bend the Truth, and You, to Get What They Want by Richard Telofski (2012)
Living on a Meme - How Anti-Corporate Activists Bend the Truth, and You, to Get What They Want is about the NGOs and activist groups that engage corporations adversarially and how they use “meme” to further their anti-corporate agendas. What’s meme? Say the word as meeeeeem. The dictionary says that a meme is an idea that spreads from one person to another. And thanks to today’s Internet, memes get started, spread, and believed in a flash, whether they are true or not, making them formidable tools for groups that damage company reputations. Here in his fifth book, author Richard Telofski takes an in-depth look at anti-corporate NGOs and activist groups that use memes cleverly to “compete” with the image of the companies they target. These groups unabashedly use unchallenged memes to bribe people to their side of their anti-corporate argument. Bribe? Yes. By leveraging a meme, these groups bribe people with something, a way to feel better about themselves, often with scant or no support of the meme. Through their “meme-mangling,” adversarial NGOs and activists can impose undeserved damage on corporate reputations, costing market share, revenue, and jobs, maybe one of them yours. These organizations are truly competitors, not only to the individual corporations that they target, but also to the economic system in general. Living on a Meme is compiled from a selection of articles published on Richard’s Web site, Telofski.com, between August 1, 2009 through August 3, 2010. But, many of these writings are more essay than article. Within the essays in this book, you’ll find insights, theories, as well as specific facts and analysis on how certain NGOs and activist groups operate online and offline to sap companies of their vital reputation. By reading this book, you’ll discover how these “irregular” competitors make use of existing cultural memes, true or not, and how they contribute to those memes, strengthening them and contributing to the degradation of a company’s image. Don’t worry. This book isn’t just a repackaging of blog postings. You’re going to get more than that. At the end of each chapter you will find bonus “Take-Aways.” Those Take-Aways are critical analyses of the essays in the chapter, pointing out for you how what was just discussed relates to an NGO’s or activist’s reliance of living on a meme or their hope that YOU are living on THEIR meme for them. You’ll also find in this book 23 exclusive essays that appear only in this book. |
|  | |  | No More War Memes: A practical, realistic program of cultural engineering to eliminate war from human society forever by Joe Rebholz (2009)
This book describes a practical program of cultural engineering that, over time, will eliminate war from human society forever. War is always a net loss to humanity, even though a few corporations and individuals may profit from it. So almost everyone should work to eliminate war. Wars are caused by war memes, ideas in people's minds, that lead them to war, contrary to their own self interest. We go to war because we are misled by our emotions, feelings, and limited thinking, based on war memes, which saturate most of our cultures. Using the latest results from psychology, neuroscience, sociology, political science, and cognitive linguistics, this book will show you how to identify, analyze, modify, or eliminate your war memes. More than 50 war memes are analyzed. The anti war movement can become a worldwide movement like the environmental movement, the anti slavery movement, and the women's liberation movements. We must eliminate war if humanity is to survive and prosper. Let's do it! View on Google Books the book page, the author page, or the book contents. |
| | E-Book only |
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Links
Tim Tyler |
Contact |
http://timtyler.org/
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