Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society: The New Science Of Memes (The Kluwer international series in engineering & computer science) [Hardcover]

Aaron Lynch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 1996 | Series: The Kluwer international series in engineering & computer science

Fans of Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Bennet, and Richard Dawkins (as well as science buffs and readers of Wired Magazine) will revel in Aaron Lynch’s 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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Why do certain ideas become popular? The naive view is that it's because they're true, or at least justified. This fascinating book, influenced by evolutionary biology and epidemiology, is the first full-scale examination of some of the other reasons. Consider Aaron Lynch's example of optimism--it may not be true or warranted, but it tends to prevail because optimists tend to have more children to pass along their outlook to. Sometimes, Lynch points out, there is a paradoxical but predictable expansion-contraction pattern to the social spread of ideas. If nothing else, lobbyists need to look into this stuff to see which side their bread is really buttered on. Warning: this book is densely written. But it's worth the wade.

From Publishers Weekly

A meme, in the newly emerging discipline called memetics, is a self-propagating idea, a unit of cultural imitation that, much like a biological or computer virus, effectively programs its own retransmission. Memes can percolate through society by motivating their "host population," or by reshuffling old ideas into novel configurations, or via human proselytizers. According to Lynch, formerly a Fermilab engineering physicist, a nuclear family meme set (combining ideas of sexual monogamy, long-term commitment and biparental upbringing) ensures that the people whose mating behavior produces the most children will also personally raise those children. A crucifixion meme, he cautions, leaves Christianity vulnerable to exploitation by phony religious leaders who generate guilt-inspired contributions; the Yahweh god meme, spreading among the ancient Hebrews, fostered a unified moral code. Lynch also uses memes to explain current controversies over abortion and handguns, men's breast fetishes, homophobia, diets that achieve temporary results and much else. Memetics is a radical science, modeled on genetics, that cuts against the grain of conventional and habitual thinking; Lynch does a fine job of covering its pros and cons, exploring its range and making it accessible to nonexpert readers.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; 1st edition (October 17, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465084664
• ISBN-13: 978-0465084661
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,930,737 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars This book got me to think, December 17, 1999

By 

Jake Sapiens - See all my reviews

This review is from: Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society: The New Science Of Memes (The Kluwer international series in engineering & computer science) (Hardcover)

I read Thought Contagion as my first exposure to a book dedicated to the subject of memes and memetics and one of my earliest reads dealing with cultural evolution devoid of the Social Darwinism delusions prevalent earlier in this century. It captivated me to read further on this subject. While certainly drier and more academic reading than either Blackmore or Brodie, you shouldn't have any trouble staying focussed through it if overexposure to pop-media hasn't reduced your attention span a lot. If you actually get annoyed by hype, you may even enjoy this book more than the other two (see my other Amazon reviews of "The Meme Machine" and "Virus of the Mind" both recommended).

While Lynch does not have the behavioral sciences background of Blackmore, he makes up for it in thoroughness. He has as clear a grasp of the basic understandings of memetics as any. His examples prove very useful to orient us in this understanding. Some of them have come under scrutiny by others in the memetics field with more background in biological and behavioral sciences. But they still serve as good didactic devices to the uninitiated, for which purpose they seem intended. This book only represents the introduction to Lynch's ideas in this subject. He has gone on to provide much stimulus to other serious thinkers in the field through his contributions in the online Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transfer (JOM-EMIT -- you will also find some Blackmore contributions there as well as many others).

If you like this book, then certainly Susan Blackmore's "The Meme Machine" deserves some consideration, a little more hyped, but with some deeper background in the behavioral sciences. If you don't like this presentation at all but still want to get a good introduction to the ideas of memetics, then Richard Brodie's "Virus of the Mind" may interest you better, attention grabbing and dealing more with psychological survival and self-realization in the context of our evolutionary cultural environment. If you remain skeptical about the idea of memes, but find yourself intrigued by the broader ideas of cultural evolution, then you may enjoy E. O. Wilson's "Consilience" for a renowned evolutionary biologist's approach to culture, or Gary Taylor's "Cultural Selection" for the cultural ideas of a renowned Shakespearean scholar immersed in evolutionary thinking.

Enjoy reading "Thought Contagion." It will get you thinking. It sure did for me.

33 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Describes "spread me" aspect better than the "accept me", October 4, 2000

By 

Todd I. Stark "Cellular Wetware plus Books" (Philadelphia, Pa USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Thought Contagion (Paperback)

The idea of beliefs helping to spread themselves is introduced well here, as a partial explanation of "thought contagion." It is a compelling view, at least superficially, but not a deeply satisfying explanation for the spread of human belief.

This seems to be the best introduction to the concept. The limitations of this book are more limitations of the meme concept than of Lynch's exposition. Lynch makes clear, in a way that others often do not, what memetic science is expected to accomplish and what it is not expected to accomplish.

Lynch briefly mentions the medical metaphor of "contagion," which like Richard Brodie's "Mind Virus," has clear and unambiguous negative connotations that serve distinct rhetorical purposes. Perhaps the best known example is the comparison of religious faith to a viral infection popularized originally by Richard Dawkins ("The Selfish Gene").

The main problem with this is that it leaves us to wonder what the host might have been composed of prior to the "infection !" What does an "uninfected" mind look like ? We know what an uninfected finger looks like, and it is very different from an infected one. In spite of this, we find the compulsory paragraph by Lynch that these are "neutral" terms. Perhaps in their intention, but not in the effect they have on discussion and thinking, even among memeticists themselves. And the choice of _which_ beliefs are part of the host and which are infestations is probably arbitrary. All beliefs are infestations in some sense in the neutral view.

Since scientific thinking came historically after medieval religion in the West, for example, it was scientific memes that were the original infestation on religious faith memes, not the reverse. And clearly the two are still in conflict in some ways, seen in bold relief in Kansas.

The basic idea behind all this is not just a rhetorical combat of ideas however. It is much more notable and interesting than that. The idea is that beliefs influence behavior, in a way that can cause us to further spread and accept those very beliefs. So memetic transmission is effectively a model of a feedback loop where a belief is spread from one person to another, then that belief influences the receiver to further spread the belief. Lynch further makes the idea more accessible by showing distinct "modes" (plausible mechanisms) by which beliefs may be said to propagate themselves. But it is in the details of the transmission modes that I find it hard to believe that memetic theories can stand independently of individual psychology.

For example, A taboo against masturbation, Lynch suggests, might lead us to reproduce more, thus leading to more offspring, who presumably would inherit the taboo from their parents, thus spreading it. This is an example of Lynch's "parental quantity" mode. The modes, he admits, are not distinct; they interact and overlap with each other, complicating the study of how beliefs are transmitted. Thus, the question of why an adult should retain the taboo against masturbation imposed on them as children and pass it on in turn to their children.

The role played by a belief over the lifespan of an individual is de-emphasized in memetic analysis, as are the qualities of individuals which lead them to either accept or reject the "memes" that others attempt to infect them with.

One of the best examples of this is given by Lynch in a brief passage about political philosophy spread as thought contagion. He notes that poverty seems to influence people to accept memes that promise to raise them out of poverty (socialism, communism). He also notes that memes of capitalism tend to propgate themselves partly because the bring wealth to the holders. Finally, he points out that memes that don't make promises they can't keep (Islam, for example, makes not claim to enrich material wealth) have some additional stability because people are less likely to become disenchanted with them when they don't seem to bring what was promised. So unfalsifiability becomes a positive factor in the longevity of meme, but at the same time, believable promises also help the spread of memes.

The underlying assumption of this reasoning though complicates the meme concept, because it means that memes are not just spread due to their own characteristics, but also because of the way they are interpreted and evaluated by individuals. And that process is known to be heavily influenced by social context, not just by the content of the belief in question. Social scientists seem to find all sorts of things like authority, group identity, birth order, the historical era we grow up in, gender, and our past experience, that heavily influence whether we accept an idea.

While the meme itself may plausibly influence its own spread by causing "spread me" behavior in its host, it probably has less success in influencing "accept me" behavior in new potential hosts. That's the part, at the boundaries, that memetics becomes difficult to separate from other behavioral sciences, and seems to need to consider the individual characteristics of hosts. A consideration that muddles the concept and its pristine focus on the characteristics of beliefs which influence their own spread. Lynch, as other memetics proponents, addresses this important aspect, but only in passing. A future text that makes these boundary conditions at least as clear as Lynch makes the various modes of transmission will be a particularly welcome contribution to the fundamental memetics idea.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Valuable Insights, April 14, 1999

By 

Alex Burns ([e-mail]) (Melbourne (Australia)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society: The New Science Of Memes (The Kluwer international series in engineering & computer science) (Hardcover)

Aaron Lynch is an ex-Fermilab physicist who co-independently discovered the meme in 1978, and has been researching memetics full-time since 1986. His work has been cited by Douglas Hofstadter as important, and he co-edits the online peer-reviewed 'Journal of Memetics'.

'Thought Contagion' is the first mainstream book published on this new science, and has some excellent early chapters on the history of memetics, and importantly, the relationship between memetics and other sciences such as socio-biology, epidemiology, and the social sciences. Lynch draws on the earlier work of Dawkins, Dennett, and Hofstadter to present a solid scientific model, which he has developed elsewhere via extensive mathematical proofs.

The presentation of propagation modes is more precise and scientific than a more populist evolutionary psychology/drives-hot button influenced work like Richard Brodie's 'Virus of the Mind' (Integral Press, 1996). Brodie has interestingly admitted that Lynch actually began his work before Brodie did, and that Lynch's book was stalled by a careful peer-review process (leaving aside the heated Brodie/Lynch debates on the future direction of memetics and its public presentation). The bibliography is also incredibly useful. Lynch's writing is crisp and clear, very readable but also very serious. Lynch wants to convince you, and often succeeds.

Where most memetics books become controversial is in their analysis of contemporary social issues. For many readers, the archetypal book on memetics is still to be written, but the science is still in its infancy, and has developed much over the past several years.

Lynch does an admirable job of examining a broad range of issues, from the prevalence of different forms of religious fundamentalism and talk-show/advocacy journalism politics to debates on human sexuality, drug addiction, and gun control. The latter are so hotly debated that Lynch is likely to come across sounding subdued compared to typical media hype. But this is a scientist talking rationally, not a journalist.

Lynch is at his best when he takes an indepth case-study approach, backing up his arguments with scientific data and graphs (a sample case-study on the Amish is presented in the opening chapter, and is available online). Readers are more likely to disagree with his handling of other issues, and not look at either his presentation, or how he subtly works thought contagion theory into his arguments. It takes several readings to appreciate his sections on linguistics and abstract mathematics as well.

Definitely worth reading, Lynch's book was the first to give a serious indication of the potential of memetics as a valid new science, and to hint at powerful social applications. Lynch continues to reveal and further develop his key models, important mathematical proofs, and real-world applications.