Friday 30 December 2011

Stats on memetics vs cultural evolution

I thought it would be interesting to attempt to quantify how memetics and cultural evolution are doing on the internet, relative to each other:

One methodology is to apply Google search statistics to their terminology:

Alas, most of their terms typically don't have enough volume to allow the use of Google Insights for Search. However I can do this:

...and this:

In other cases, I'll have to use static figures.

MemeticsCountCultural evolutionCount
"memetic drift"9,230"cultural drift"53,500
"meme"56,900,000"cultural variant"10,600
"memetics"756,000"cultural evolution"1,020,000

Of course, science is more than just a populatity contest - and there are about a million other ways in which this methodology is limited.

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