Memetics

Welcome

Memes are hot. Since Richard Dawkins talked about them in his revolutionary book The Selfish Gene a lot has been said and written about cultural evolution and the spreading of culture based on the principles of natural selection. A school of thought called memetics has become more and more prominent in various fields such as antropology, psychology, linguistics, marketing, computerscience and architecture. The field has developed from a theoretical field to an applied science. Memetics is predominantly used as an applied science in marketing and computerscience and has thus faced the challenges from quite some of its critics.

As one of the researchers that has stood up to the challenges set by various other scientists I have applied memetics to the field of linguistics and have been able to make a quantitative study, thus refuting the claim that memetics is only a vague theory with loosely based concepts. From my 2003 study I have created 'Memetics 101' to provide an introduction to the field of memetics. Both novice and beginning memeticist can find basic information about memetics. A further exploration of my master's thesis can be found under that heading whereas my further research can be found in the PhD section.

I hope that you find this page an interesting stop on your journey through memetics and am looking forward to your feedback!

Klaas Chielens.