{"id":22390,"date":"2013-12-29T08:41:13","date_gmt":"2013-12-29T13:41:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22390"},"modified":"2013-12-29T08:42:40","modified_gmt":"2013-12-29T13:42:40","slug":"qotd-memes-and-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/12\/29\/qotd-memes-and-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Memes and culture"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>People in all cultures grow up and acquire a set of beliefs. One way of looking at this is to call the beliefs that are inherited &#8220;memes&#8221;. Just as &#8220;genes&#8221; code for hereditary traits, so memes are intended to show the inheritance of individual items, rather than a whole belief system. A tune like &#8220;Happy Birthday&#8221;, a concept like Father Christmas, atom, bicycle, or fairy &mdash; all are memes. A whole slew of memes that forms an interacting whole is called a memeplex, and religions are the best examples, which at various times and in various cultures have had, or still do have, many linked-up memes like &#8220;There is Heaven and there is Hell &#8230;&#8221; and &#8220;Unless you pray to <em>this<\/em> God you&#8217;ll go to Hell&#8221; and &#8220;You must kill those who don&#8217;t believe in this &#8230;&#8221; and so on. You will have some familiarity with other religions, and you will appreciate that we&#8217;re not saying that <em>your<\/em> religion is like that. It&#8217;s all the others, the mistaken ones &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, &#038; Jack Cohen, &#8220;Disbelief System&#8221;, <em>The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day<\/em>, 2013.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>People in all cultures grow up and acquire a set of beliefs. One way of looking at this is to call the beliefs that are inherited &#8220;memes&#8221;. Just as &#8220;genes&#8221; code for hereditary traits, so memes are intended to show the inheritance of individual items, rather than a whole belief system. A tune like &#8220;Happy [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,41,11],"tags":[262,42,632],"class_list":["post-22390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-quotations","category-religion","tag-culture","tag-sociology","tag-terrypratchett"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5P8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22390"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23476,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22390\/revisions\/23476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}