Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society: The New Science of Memes

Fans of Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Bennet, and Richard Dawkins (as well as science buffs and readers of Wired Magazine) will revel in Aaron Lynchs groundbreaking examination of memetics—the new study of how ideas and beliefs spread. What characterizes a meme is its capacity for displacing rival ideas and beliefs in an evolutionary drama that determines and changes the way people think. Exactly how do ideas spread, and what are the factors that make them genuine thought contagions? Why, for instance, do some beliefs spread throughout society, while others dwindle to extinction? What drives those intensely held beliefs that spawn ideological and political debates such as views on abortion and opinions about sex and sexuality?By drawing on examples from everyday life, Lynch develops a conceptual basis for understanding memetics. Memes evolve by natural selection in a process similar to that of Genes in evolutionary biology. What makes an idea a potent meme is how effectively it out-propagates other ideas. In memetic evolution, the “fittest ideas” are not always the truest or the most helpful, but the ones best at self replication.Thus, crash diets spread not because of lasting benefit, but by alternating episodes of dramatic weight loss and slow regain. Each sudden thinning provokes onlookers to ask, “How did you do it?” thereby manipulating them to experiment with the diet and in turn, spread it again. The faster the pounds return, the more often these people enter that disseminating phase, all of which favors outbreaks of the most pathogenic diets. Like a software virus traveling on the Internet or a flu strain passing through a city, thought contagions proliferate by programming for their own propagation. Lynch argues that certain beliefs spread like viruses and evolve like microbes, as mutant strains vie for more adherents and more hosts. In its most revolutionary aspect, memetics asks not how people accumulate ideas, but how ideas accumulate people. Readers of this intriguing theory will be amazed to discover that many popular beliefs about family, sex, politics, religion, health, and war have succeeded by their “fitness” as thought contagions.

A "meme" -- the identifiable unit of cultural imitation that becomes important through its effectiveness at self-replication -- exerts profound influences on how people live. In its most revolutionary aspect, memetics asks not how people accumulate ideas, but how ideas accumulate people. In Thought Contagion, memetics expert Aaron Lynch works out the conceptual basis for this new science, and argues that ideas and beliefs act like viruses when they spread -- the evolution of an idea or belief being akin to the evolution of living organisms. Lynch's paradigm also shows how self-propagating ideas integrate themselves on the societal level. Readers will be amazed to discover that many popular beliefs about family, sex, abortion, religion, economics, diets, and war have succeeded primarily because they emerged through thought contagion.

"Fans of Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Bennet, and Richard Dawkins (as well as science buffs and readers of Wired Magazine ) will revel in Aaron Lynchs groundbreaking examination of memetics—the new stud"

Aaron Lynch was an engineering physicist. In 1990 he was awarded a grant for full-time research by a private sponsor.