---
description: Heylighen's seven selection criteria reveal that only utility serves human needs while six other factors -- simplicity, novelty, formality, authority, publicity, conformity -- optimize for spread over accuracy
type: claim
domain: cultural-dynamics
created: 2026-02-17
source: "Web research compilation, February 2026"
confidence: likely
tradition: "applied memetics, evolutionary epistemology"
---

Francis Heylighen identified seven factors that determine whether a meme successfully propagates: simplicity (easier to reproduce), novelty (captures attention), utility (reinforced through application), formality (easier to encode with fidelity), authority (accepted from credible sources), publicity (exposure to potential hosts), and conformity (spread through group acceptance pressure). Each factor operates at a different stage of the meme lifecycle, from initial attention capture through retention and transmission.

The critical insight is that with the sole exception of utility, none of these factors inherently serves actual human needs. Simplicity selects for ideas that are easy to copy, not ideas that are true. Novelty selects for surprise, not importance. Authority selects for perceived credibility, not accuracy. Conformity selects for social acceptability, not correctness. This means the memetic selection environment is structurally biased toward propagation fitness over truth value.

This is the core tension in memetic engineering: you can optimize for propagation or for truth, and these objectives are not always aligned. Any intellectual movement that wants to spread accurate ideas faces a structural disadvantage against movements willing to sacrifice accuracy for virality. The resolution requires deliberate design -- engineering memes where truth and propagation fitness happen to coincide, or building fidelity mechanisms that compensate for the natural drift toward simplification.

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Relevant Notes:
- [[memes are intentionally designed sociocultural technologies not spontaneously emerging replicators]] -- the design framework within which selection criteria become design parameters
- [[collective intelligence requires diversity as a structural precondition not a moral preference]] -- diversity in meme pools mirrors this structural requirement
- [[the self is a memeplex that persists because memes attached to an identity get copied more than free-floating ideas]] -- identity attachment as one propagation mechanism

Topics:
- [[maps/livingip overview]]