Epidemiology of Representations

The epidemiology of representations is a framework developed by cognitive anthropologist Dan Sperber as a rival to memetics. Where memetics holds that cultural items are replicated from mind to mind like genes, Sperber argues they are reconstructed — each transmission is a new cognitive performance guided by underlying mental templates, not a copy of the preceding instance. On this account, what persists across generations is not a meme but a cognitive attractor: a region of conceptual space that minds reliably reconstruct from partial cues.

The framework draws on cognitive science and anthropology rather than evolutionary biology. Its key prediction is that cultural stability arises from shared human cognition, not from fidelity of transmission — which means the analogy between cultural and genetic evolution breaks down at the most basic level. Sperber's challenge remains the most technically serious objection to memetics as a scientific programme.

If Sperber is right, the evolution of culture looks less like population genetics and more like dynamical systems theory: cultures don't drift, they converge on basins.