Rosa Cao (Stanford University)
As informational entities, memes are not bound to any particular physical expression or specific causal mechanisms of interaction. Nonetheless, in order to participate in evolutionary explanations, they must have the right characteristics to be subject to Darwinian processes. Critics have worried about the problem of memetic reproduction in particular. Cultural inheritance cannot be so permissive that any new occurrence of a meme corresponds to a reproduction event, but it's often not clear how to distinguish reproduction from other forms of re-occurrence. I will discuss some problem cases, and then consider options for constraining the notion of memetic reproduction.
