# notes --- - [[{3.1a2} memes are units of cultural transmission 1]] # highlights --- >[Scott Atran] postulated the existence of a unit of cultural transmission, analogous to the gene, which he termed **meme** … memes would be replicators, and the mechanism by which they produced copies of themselves would be imitation >Whereas traditional social science has always assumed that cultural behaviour must ultimately benefit the individuals displaying it, according to memeticists it is not brains, individuals or societies that profit from evolutionary cultural dynamics, but memes themselves >just as DNA strands replicate by producing identical copies of themselves B with an inevitable rate of mutation, which allows for evolution -- so memes would replicate themselves in order to be transmitted from bearer to bearer >These schools of thought consider all human behaviour as the consequence of the interaction of evolved physiological and psychological variables with the natural environment > the cultural selectionism approach, which admits the existence of a *dual* system of inheritance in the human species: genetic transmission and cultural transmission. (This approach is thus sometimes also termed gene-cultural coevolution). >The memetic stance has been criticized, mainly by anthropologists, on the grounds that culture constitutes a *continuum*, and any units within it will necessarily be arbitrary constructs of the observer. >even if cultural units can be properly distinguished, the memeticists' insistence on replication as the only mechanism for cultural inheritance has also been criticized on the grounds that replication is the exception rather than the rule in processes of cultural transmission -- the rule being almost always *transformation*. >==*The copying process is probably much less precise \[in the case of memes\] than in the case of genes: there may be a certain «mutational» element in every copying event \[...\] Memes may partially blend with each other in a way that genes do not. New «mutations» may be «directed» rather than random with respect to evolutionary trends. \[7\]*== [from darwin]