Aaron Lynch
Encyclopedia
Aaron Lynch was an American writer, best known for his book Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society.
where he spent some time working on the PDP-11
hardware project. In his spare time, he worked on developing his thesis into a book which he also planned to title, Abstract Evolution.
He worked extensively on the theoretical underpinnings of idea self-replication, developing a symbolic language and deriving mathematics from epidemiologic formulae to describe idea transmission through populations. While conducting a literature search for his book, Lynch discovered the work of anthropologist F.T. Cloak on socially transmitted technology in birds, and a brief proposal for a field of Memetics
in Richard Dawkins
' book, The Selfish Gene
, although Lynch was not aware of these authors' work until after his own theory was substantially developed. Early chapters of his book came to the attention of Douglas Hofstadter
, who featured it in his Scientific American
column Metamagical Themas
in 1983. The first draft of the book was complete as early as 1984. A grant from a former colleague who had become a video technology millionaire enabled Lynch to leave Fermilab in 1990 and concentrate full-time on writing.
In the early 1990s, he contributed theoretical and mathematical models on idea transmission to the Journal of Ideas, the first scholarly journal dedicated to memetics.
Lynch's book, after considerable revision, was eventually published in 1996 as Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society.
In 1998, Lynch's "Units, Events and Dynamics in Memetic Evolution," provided much of his scholarly theoretical work omitted by "Thought Contagion". The paper detailed precise conceptual definitions of memetic terms, symbolic language to model idea replication, and mathematics to model population level idea transmission summarizing a decade of his conceptual work.
In August 2004, Lynch appeared to accuse Fast Company
magazine and Seth Godin
of plagiarism, claiming his complaint was backed, or even encouraged, by an unnamed 'major writers organization'.
Aaron Lynch died on November 14, 2005 at the age of 47 years from anoxic encephalopathy
after taking an overdose of an opiate-based pain killer, described as an accident in the Coroner's Report. His remains are buried in Homewood Gardens in Homewood, Illinois
.
Contagion in his 1979 undergraduate senior thesis entitled "Abstract Evolution
." The thesis explored the notion that an idea which can influence human behavior
may blindly evolve the capacity to influence its own prevalence in the human population by motivating its human hosts to engage in behavior that spreads the idea. Just as a virus
which elicits sneezes from its human host is more likely to survive by passing from host to host than a similar but non-sneeze-provoking virus, Lynch hypothesized that an idea
which stimulated its host to proselytize e.g., "Go and make disciples of all nations" (Gospel of Matthew
28:19) would be more likely to survive and become popular than an idea which did not elicit such activity. He identified other mechanisms which might also increase an idea's market share
and longevity, such as influencing the human host to produce more children than one otherwise would, to instruct one's children in the belief earlier and more rigorously than one otherwise might, to isolate or effectively immunize oneself or one's children from exposure to competing ideas, to actively impede the communications of nonbelievers, or to utilize mass communications media
to spread the idea to people that the host would never personally meet.
Cultural anthropology
had long held that cultural beliefs and information—i.e., socially propagated ideas—survive and propagate because of the survival value they provide to the human groups that adopt them. Lynch embraced this notion of host-benefiting idea propagation, but his analysis added to this the notion that ideas could also propagate at the expense of their human hosts. He noted, for example, that beliefs which induced their hosts into self-sacrifice before sufficiently large audiences (e.g. earlier Christians refusing to worship the Emperor and dying serenely
in Roman arenas or Islamist suicide bombers' taping farewell videos for posthumous broadcast to worldwide audiences) could survive or even multiply just by capturing one or more hosts to replace the one it sacrificed.
We may see ourselves as intellectual free agents shopping in a marketplace of ideas, but Lynch asks us to consider the disturbing question: could ideas also be shopping for us? Do we own our most cherished beliefs or do they own us? However, Lynch in no way meant to suggest that ideas have consciousness, will or planning abilities. To Lynch, ideas are information encoded in human neuron
s or other media. Like computer virus
es, they are the products of human thinking and are in no way aware of or deliberating controlling their self-replicating abilities. However, unlike computer viruses, ideas often evolve new or improved contagious properties without intentional human
design, through copying infidelity mutations or recombination into powerful new belief sets. According to Lynch, Natural selection
determines which ideas survive and propagate successfully through human populations and which lose market share to the point of extinction.
Lynch's thesis provided a cogent explanation for how not only true
and useful ideas, but also unprovable or even false
notions with sufficiently "contagious" properties could over generations become the predominant beliefs of whole societies. While he insisted that the contagiousness of ideas was largely independent of its truth value, as he immersed himself in this analysis, his frequently uttered motto became, "People don't learn from each other's mistakes. They learn each other's mistakes."
ticists. Some typical criticisms include the following:
Lynch addressed such criticism in the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation,
Lynch also participated in the Cultural Evolution workshop at the Center for Human Evolution on May 18-19 2000. His input is acknowledged in http://www.futurefoundation.org/documents/che_pro_wrk4.pdf. However, when contacted by the publishers in 2004, he refused to give permission for his contribution to be included.
Biography
After obtaining bachelors degrees in mathematics and philosophy from the University of Illinois, Lynch accepted a position in 1979 as an engineering physicist at FermilabFermilab
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory , located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics...
where he spent some time working on the PDP-11
PDP-11
The PDP-11 was a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a succession of products in the PDP series. The PDP-11 replaced the PDP-8 in many real-time applications, although both product lines lived in parallel for more than 10 years...
hardware project. In his spare time, he worked on developing his thesis into a book which he also planned to title, Abstract Evolution.
He worked extensively on the theoretical underpinnings of idea self-replication, developing a symbolic language and deriving mathematics from epidemiologic formulae to describe idea transmission through populations. While conducting a literature search for his book, Lynch discovered the work of anthropologist F.T. Cloak on socially transmitted technology in birds, and a brief proposal for a field of Memetics
Memetics
Memetics is a theory of mental content based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution, originating from Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene. It purports to be an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. A meme, analogous to a gene, is essentially a "unit of...
in Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL , known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author...
' book, The Selfish Gene
The Selfish Gene
The Selfish Gene is a book on evolution by Richard Dawkins, published in 1976. It builds upon the principal theory of George C. Williams's first book Adaptation and Natural Selection. Dawkins coined the term "selfish gene" as a way of expressing the gene-centred view of evolution as opposed to the...
, although Lynch was not aware of these authors' work until after his own theory was substantially developed. Early chapters of his book came to the attention of Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics...
, who featured it in his Scientific American
Scientific American
Scientific American is a popular science magazine. It is notable for its long history of presenting science monthly to an educated but not necessarily scientific public, through its careful attention to the clarity of its text as well as the quality of its specially commissioned color graphics...
column Metamagical Themas
Metamagical Themas
Metamagical Themas is a collection of eclectic articles written for Scientific American during the early 1980s by Douglas Hofstadter, and published together as a book in 1985 by Basic Books ....
in 1983. The first draft of the book was complete as early as 1984. A grant from a former colleague who had become a video technology millionaire enabled Lynch to leave Fermilab in 1990 and concentrate full-time on writing.
In the early 1990s, he contributed theoretical and mathematical models on idea transmission to the Journal of Ideas, the first scholarly journal dedicated to memetics.
Lynch's book, after considerable revision, was eventually published in 1996 as Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society.
In 1998, Lynch's "Units, Events and Dynamics in Memetic Evolution," provided much of his scholarly theoretical work omitted by "Thought Contagion". The paper detailed precise conceptual definitions of memetic terms, symbolic language to model idea replication, and mathematics to model population level idea transmission summarizing a decade of his conceptual work.
In August 2004, Lynch appeared to accuse Fast Company
Fast Company (magazine)
Fast Company is a full-color business magazine that releases 10 issues per year and reports on topics including innovation, digital media, technology, change management, leadership, design, and social responsibility...
magazine and Seth Godin
Seth Godin
Seth Godin is an American entrepreneur, author and public speaker. Godin popularized the topic of permission marketing.-Background:...
of plagiarism, claiming his complaint was backed, or even encouraged, by an unnamed 'major writers organization'.
Aaron Lynch died on November 14, 2005 at the age of 47 years from anoxic encephalopathy
Encephalopathy
Encephalopathy means disorder or disease of the brain. In modern usage, encephalopathy does not refer to a single disease, but rather to a syndrome of global brain dysfunction; this syndrome can be caused by many different illnesses.-Terminology:...
after taking an overdose of an opiate-based pain killer, described as an accident in the Coroner's Report. His remains are buried in Homewood Gardens in Homewood, Illinois
Homewood, Illinois
Homewood is a village in Cook County, Illinois, United States. The population was 19,543 at the 2000 census. Homewood is a sister city to Homewood, Alabama.- Geography :...
.
Outline of Lynch's theory
Lynch first developed the themes of ThoughtThought
"Thought" generally refers to any mental or intellectual activity involving an individual's subjective consciousness. It can refer either to the act of thinking or the resulting ideas or arrangements of ideas. Similar concepts include cognition, sentience, consciousness, and imagination...
Contagion in his 1979 undergraduate senior thesis entitled "Abstract Evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
." The thesis explored the notion that an idea which can influence human behavior
Human behavior
Human behavior refers to the range of behaviors exhibited by humans and which are influenced by culture, attitudes, emotions, values, ethics, authority, rapport, hypnosis, persuasion, coercion and/or genetics....
may blindly evolve the capacity to influence its own prevalence in the human population by motivating its human hosts to engage in behavior that spreads the idea. Just as a virus
Virus
A virus is a small infectious agent that can replicate only inside the living cells of organisms. Viruses infect all types of organisms, from animals and plants to bacteria and archaea...
which elicits sneezes from its human host is more likely to survive by passing from host to host than a similar but non-sneeze-provoking virus, Lynch hypothesized that an idea
Idea
In the most narrow sense, an idea is just whatever is before the mind when one thinks. Very often, ideas are construed as representational images; i.e. images of some object. In other contexts, ideas are taken to be concepts, although abstract concepts do not necessarily appear as images...
which stimulated its host to proselytize e.g., "Go and make disciples of all nations" (Gospel of Matthew
Gospel of Matthew
The Gospel According to Matthew is one of the four canonical gospels, one of the three synoptic gospels, and the first book of the New Testament. It tells of the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth...
28:19) would be more likely to survive and become popular than an idea which did not elicit such activity. He identified other mechanisms which might also increase an idea's market share
Market share
Market share is the percentage of a market accounted for by a specific entity. In a survey of nearly 200 senior marketing managers, 67 percent responded that they found the "dollar market share" metric very useful, while 61% found "unit market share" very useful.Marketers need to be able to...
and longevity, such as influencing the human host to produce more children than one otherwise would, to instruct one's children in the belief earlier and more rigorously than one otherwise might, to isolate or effectively immunize oneself or one's children from exposure to competing ideas, to actively impede the communications of nonbelievers, or to utilize mass communications media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
to spread the idea to people that the host would never personally meet.
Cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans, collecting data about the impact of global economic and political processes on local cultural realities. Anthropologists use a variety of methods, including participant observation,...
had long held that cultural beliefs and information—i.e., socially propagated ideas—survive and propagate because of the survival value they provide to the human groups that adopt them. Lynch embraced this notion of host-benefiting idea propagation, but his analysis added to this the notion that ideas could also propagate at the expense of their human hosts. He noted, for example, that beliefs which induced their hosts into self-sacrifice before sufficiently large audiences (e.g. earlier Christians refusing to worship the Emperor and dying serenely
Martyr
A martyr is somebody who suffers persecution and death for refusing to renounce, or accept, a belief or cause, usually religious.-Meaning:...
in Roman arenas or Islamist suicide bombers' taping farewell videos for posthumous broadcast to worldwide audiences) could survive or even multiply just by capturing one or more hosts to replace the one it sacrificed.
We may see ourselves as intellectual free agents shopping in a marketplace of ideas, but Lynch asks us to consider the disturbing question: could ideas also be shopping for us? Do we own our most cherished beliefs or do they own us? However, Lynch in no way meant to suggest that ideas have consciousness, will or planning abilities. To Lynch, ideas are information encoded in human neuron
Neuron
A neuron is an electrically excitable cell that processes and transmits information by electrical and chemical signaling. Chemical signaling occurs via synapses, specialized connections with other cells. Neurons connect to each other to form networks. Neurons are the core components of the nervous...
s or other media. Like computer virus
Computer virus
A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another. The term "virus" is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware, including but not limited to adware and spyware programs that do not have the reproductive ability...
es, they are the products of human thinking and are in no way aware of or deliberating controlling their self-replicating abilities. However, unlike computer viruses, ideas often evolve new or improved contagious properties without intentional human
Human
Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...
design, through copying infidelity mutations or recombination into powerful new belief sets. According to Lynch, Natural selection
Natural selection
Natural selection is the nonrandom process by which biologic traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution....
determines which ideas survive and propagate successfully through human populations and which lose market share to the point of extinction.
Lynch's thesis provided a cogent explanation for how not only true
True
True may refer to:* Truth, the state of being in accord with fact or reality-Music:* True , 1996* True , 2002* True , 1983** "True"...
and useful ideas, but also unprovable or even false
False
False or falsehood may refer to:*False *Lie or falsehood, a type of deception in the form of an untruthful statement*Falsity or falsehood, in law, deceitfulness by one party that results in damage to another...
notions with sufficiently "contagious" properties could over generations become the predominant beliefs of whole societies. While he insisted that the contagiousness of ideas was largely independent of its truth value, as he immersed himself in this analysis, his frequently uttered motto became, "People don't learn from each other's mistakes. They learn each other's mistakes."
Reception and criticism
His work received a mixed reception among academics and among other memeMeme
A meme is "an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena...
ticists. Some typical criticisms include the following:
- Lynch's work is theoretical, as yet unproven by empirical or computer simulation research.
- Lynch cites few of the works within the historic literature of social science which foreshadow a theory of social contagion.
- Some memeticists dispute his definition of the meme (see memeticsMemeticsMemetics is a theory of mental content based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution, originating from Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene. It purports to be an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. A meme, analogous to a gene, is essentially a "unit of...
article).
Lynch addressed such criticism in the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation,
Trivia
Lynch's website http://www.thoughtcontagion.com was active from February 20, 1999 to August 29, 2004. The domain name has now been repurchased by Speedy Web of New Orleans.Lynch also participated in the Cultural Evolution workshop at the Center for Human Evolution on May 18-19 2000. His input is acknowledged in http://www.futurefoundation.org/documents/che_pro_wrk4.pdf. However, when contacted by the publishers in 2004, he refused to give permission for his contribution to be included.
Published works
- Lynch A. 1991. Thought contagion as abstract evolution. Journal of Ideas 2: 3-10.
- Lynch A. 1996. Thought contagion. How Belief Spreads Through Society. The New Science of Memes. Basic Books.
- Lynch, A. 1997 "Thought Contagion and Mass Belief". published in German as "Gedankeninfektion Wie berzeugungen Menschen Finden" gdi-impuls #3, September, 1997, pp. 42–54.
- Lynch, A., 1998; Units, Events and Dynamics in Memetic Evolution. Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, Volume 2. http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/1998/vol2/lynch_a.html
- Lynch, A., 1999. "Memes and Mass Delusion": A lecture presented to the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking.
- Lynch, A. 1999. "The Millennium Thought Contagion." Skeptical Inquirer 23: (6), pp. 32–36.
- Lynch, A., 2000, Thought Contagions in the Stock Market. Journal of Psychology and Financial Markets 1: 1, p. 10-23
- Lynch, A., 2001, "Evolutionary contagion in mental software," in "The evolution of intelligence," edited by Robert J. Sternberg, James C. KaufmanJames C. KaufmanJames C. Kaufman is a psychologist known for his research on creativity. He is a Professor of Psychology at the California State University, San Bernardino, where he is the director of the Learning Research Institute. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in Cognitive Psychology, where he...
. Publishers: Mahwah, N.J. : L. Erlbaum Associates. - Lynch, A., 2001, "Thought contagion in the stock markets: A general framework and focus on the Internet bubble," in Derivatives Use, Trading and Regulation 6:4, p. 338-362.
- Lynch, A., 2002, "Thought Contagions in Deflating and Inflating Phases of the Bubble" Journal of Psychology and Financial Markets volume 3, number 2, pages 112-117.
- Lynch, A., 2002, "Thought Contagion in the Dynamics of Mass Conflict" Swedish Defence Research Agency publication.
- Lynch, A., 2003, "An Introduction to evolutionary epidemiology of ideas" The Biological Physicist. Vol. 3. No.2, pages 7–13.