6: WTC Collapse Records Studied as Meme Replication
Recall, the main thesis of this book is that there is no accurate technical record or descriptions of the collapses of any of the 3 buildings in any government, academic, or professional literature. If this thesis is true, one can expect to see evidence of extreme confusion within the discussion of these issues on all social levels.
One can witness rampant confusion regarding all aspects of the collapses, as it is quite visible. It is everywhere, at all technical and social levels, yet few people notice how poorly the collapse histories and collapse mechanics are described.
David Bohm from part 1.2, interview 2:
"The real test of a map is whether it guides us correctly through a city. If it's a wrong map we will find incoherence in our actions."
1) They are detached from the visual record of events
2) They are detached from written records of events
1) For technical accuracy
2) For perception: As an indication of how each author understood the WTC1 and 2 collapse modes at the time they wrote their respective papers
3) As a study of propagating memes within a meme-plex: as memes and memetics
A meme (/ˈmiːm/ meem)[1] is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."[2] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.[3]
The word meme is a shortening (modeled on gene) of mimeme (from Ancient Greek μίμημα Greek pronunciation: [m�ːmɛːma] mīmēma, "imitated thing", from μιμεῖσθαι mimeisthai, "to imitate", from μῖμος mimos "mime")[4] and it was coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976)[1][5] as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catch-phrases, fashion, and the technology of building arches.[6]
Proponents theorize that memes may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution. Memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, each of which influence a meme's reproductive success. Memes spread through the behavior that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate. Memes that replicate most effectively enjoy more success, and some may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.[7]
A field of study called memetics[8] arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model.
Inheritance patterns in citation networks reveal scientific memes
by Tobias Kuhn, Matjaˇz Perc, and Dirk Helbing
The paper is linked here.
1) To map the entire network to see and understand the body of literature as a whole
2) To map individual memes replicating through published papers, news articles, and popular perception.
3) To understand the origin and replication of memes related to the WTC collapses
Science is central to many key pillars of human culture, and probably the most popular concept to describe the most influential aspects of our culture is that of a meme. The term "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Self ish Gene [19], where he argues that cultural entities such as words, melodies, recipes, and ideas evolve similarly as genes, involving replication and mutation but using human culture instead of the gene pool as their medium of propagation. Re cent research on memes has enhanced our understanding of the dynamics of the news cycle [20], the tracking of information epidemics in blogspace [21], and the political polarization on Twitter [22]. It has been shown that the evolution of memes can be exploited effectively for inferring networks of diffusion and influence [23], and that information contained in memes is evolving as it is being processed collectively in online social media [24]. The question of how memes compete with each other for the limited and fluctuating resource of user attention has also amassed the attention of scientists, who showed that social network structure is crucial for understanding the diversity of memes [25] and that their competition can bring the network at the brink of criticality [26], where even minute dis turbances can lead to avalanches of events that make a certain meme go viral [27].
While the study of memes in mass media and popular culture has been based primarily on their aggregated wave-like occurrence patterns, the citation network of scientific literature allows for more sophisticated and fine-grained analyses. Quantum, fission, graphene, self-organized criticality, and traffic flow are examples of well-known memes from the field of physics, but what exactly makes such memes different from other words and phrases found in the scientific literature? As an answer to this question, we propose the following definition that is modeled after Dawkins' underlying definition of the word "gene" [19]: A scientific meme is a short unit of text in a publication that is replicated in citing publications and thereby distributed around in many copies; the more likely a certain sequence of words is to be broken apart, altered, or simply not present in citing publications, the less it qualifies to be called a meme. Publications that reproduce words or phrases from cited publications are thus the analog to offspring organisms that inherit genes from their parents. In contrast to existing work on scientific memes, our approach is therefore grounded in the "inheritance mechanisms" of memes and not just their accumulated frequencies.
According to our definition, scientific memes are entities that propagate within the network of citations. To identify them and study their properties and dynamics, we therefore need databases of scientific publications that include citation data. Here we rely on 47.1 million publication records from the Web of Science, PubMed Central and the American Physical Society. Due to their representative long-term coverage of a specific field of research, we focus mainly on the titles and abstracts of almost half a million publications of the Physical Review and the pertaining citation data, which were published between July 1893 and December 2009. To demonstrate the robustness of our method, we also present results for the over 46 million publications indexed by the Web of Science, and for the over 0.6 million publications from the open access subset of PubMed Central that covers research mostly from the biomedical domain and mostly from recent years.
Memetics is a theory of mental content based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution, originating from the popularization of Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene.[1] Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer.
Susan Blackmore (2002) re-stated the definition of meme as: whatever is copied from one person to another person, whether habits, skills, songs, stories, or any other kind of information. Further she said that memes, like genes, are replicators in the sense as defined by Dawkins.[10] That is, they are information that is copied. Memes are copied by imitation, teaching and other methods. The copies are not perfect: memes are copied with variation; moreover, they compete for space in our memories and for the chance to be copied again. Only some of the variants can survive. The combination of these three elements (copies; variation; competition for survival) forms precisely the condition for Darwinian evolution, and so memes (and hence human cultures) evolve. Large groups of memes that are copied and passed on together are called co-adapted meme complexes, or memeplexes. In her definition, the way that a meme replicates is through imitation. This requires brain capacity to generally imitate a model or selectively imitate the model.
Memeplex - (an abbreviation of meme-complex) is a collection or grouping of memes that have evolved into a mutually supportive or symbiotic relationship.[31] Simply put, a meme-complex is a set of ideas that reinforce each other. Meme-complexes are roughly analogous to the symbiotic collection of individual genes that make up the genetic codes of biological organisms. An example of a memeplex would be a religion.
Meme pool - a population of interbreeding memes.
Memetic engineering - The process of deliberately creating memes, using engineering principles.