CIRCUMCISION AS A MEMEPLEX.

CIRCUMCISION AS A MEMEPLEX.

 

        [A meme is "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation."]

 

Unlike genes, only human (and possibly some primate, and electronic) brains carry memes.

A good analogy for a meme today is a computer virus. In fact, a computer virus, being merely information stored in, and transmitted between, information processing systems, is more like a meme than it is like a biological virus (which is a self-contained physical entity that actually moves between organisms, carrying genetic information with it).

 

Richard Dawkins says that as with genes, we track memes through populations by their phenotypes [ways of being physically expressed]. And he cites circumcision as a rare example of a meme phenotype that is part of a living body, like most gene phenotypes.

He says a Martian geneticist... would have to work quite hard to discover that no genes are involved in the genesis of the "roundhead" (circumcised) phenotype.

Susan Blackmore suggests that the taboo on masturbation, and circumcision, both have the evolutionary function of increasing the amount of vaginal sex, and hence the number of offspring to whom the taboo can be taught.
Enter evolutionary biology. But there is no evidence that circumcision significantly increases the birth-rate, and many circumcised men claim circumcision does not make masturbation more difficult.

 

But the belief that it did was sufficient to establish it in the U.K. and then the U.S., late in the 19th century, and once established, it sustained (and sustains) itself by associated memes that had (and have) nothing to do with masturbation or sex.

In fact, for most of the 20^th century, any role of the foreskin in sex has been ignored or denied in circumcising cultures.

 

 

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http://www.circumstitions.com/meme.html 

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