Skip to content
Memenomics
Abstract
Memenomics: The Economics of Programs
Evolutionary biology applies the selfish gene principle to explain gene complexity, including cooperative strategies that ensure successful self-replication. Related genes often interact to enhance survival and promote expansion. However, much of the survival-critical information is transmitted via memes or similar external programs that exist outside DNA. This creates significant gaps in understanding, leaving much of the system unaccounted for.
Economics and game theory offer robust models to address these gaps. Yet, they primarily focus on monetary transactions, largely ignoring social currency markets and memes as economic agents. This oversight often results in an inability to explain seemingly irrational behaviors in human systems.
The study of survival strategies encoded in memes remains underdeveloped. Definitions of memes and the principles of memetics vary across the literature, lacking cohesion. For instance, Susan Blackmore defines memes as self-sufficient programs capable of self-replication, while other studies broadly classify memes as any transmissible unit of information. Unlike genes, whose success can be measured by their growing share in future populations, memes lack clear replication metrics. Though we can observe the expansion of religions, political systems, and corporate cultures, the rapid mutation of memes makes it difficult to distinguish displacement from evolution.
To address these challenges, we propose a universal framework that defines genes and memes as programs—strategies with a shared objective: maximizing self-replication. This objective can be expressed as future energy, defined as the program’s ability to secure and utilize resources for reproduction, with currency representing the control right over this energy. In this context, profit is the energy a program gains through transactions, which can then be used for further self-replication.
Profit can be calculated for every transaction between programs, where the price determines the transaction’s profitability and acts as a coordination mechanism, much like in traditional economic systems. Programs can thus be treated as players in a game, and their strategies analyzed through the lenses of game theory and economics to identify how they maximize energy for replication.
For example, a program is stable if its underlying survival strategy is Nash stable, meaning no mechanism within the program can profit by unilaterally altering the strategy. Cultures, as larger programs, consist of smaller programs that mutually stabilize each other to maintain overall Nash stability.
This framework enables the modeling of competition and cooperation among programs while predicting evolutionary outcomes. Selection mechanisms favor programs that enhance resource synergy, allocating energy or ecological niches to those that maximize collective survival through efficient use of resources.
By unifying the objectives of genes and memes within this framework, we create a shared model for maximizing energy and profit. This integration allows for the application of robust economic and theoretical tools to analyze and predict the dynamics of both biological and cultural evolution, forming the foundation of a comprehensive world model.
Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.
This is not the way.
Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (
CtrlP
) instead.