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-- Toyota, M., Kitajima, M., & Shimada, H. (2008)Toyota, M., Kitajima, M., & Shimada, H. (2008). Structured Meme Theory: How Is Informational Inheritance Maintained? Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2288.
Structured Meme Theory: How Is Informational Inheritance Maintained?The recent consensus is that the range of informational inheritance by genes is limited to physical functions and infantile behavior. Human beings need to acquire basic behavioral skills and communicational skills through experience of behaving in the environment. We propose Structured Meme Theory that explains acquisition and development of these skills. Structured Meme Theory consists of action-level, behavior-level and culture-level memes. These are interconnected non-linearly and reflect the level of complexity of brain functions that map information in the environment onto internal representations. The mechanism with which the three levels of memes and genes inherit information is analogous to an information system. Genes serve as firmware that mimics behavior-level activities. Action-level memes serve as the operating system that defines general patterns of spatial-temporal behavioral functions. Behavior-level memes serve as middleware that extends the general patterns to concrete patterns. Culture-level memes serve as application tools that extend the concrete patterns to the ones that work in a number of groups of people. Download
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