Meme = an encapsulated idea

The Selfish Gene
The Blind Watchmaker

Check him out.

I can’t believe this article was in the Washington Post! I didn’t know big papers let anyone with a sense of humor write anything but boring news stories. The whole paper where I live Tennessee is a joke; I just don’t think it was meant to be funny.

I guess it just seems like when the Washington Post starts pointing to the nannies and showing how absurd things are, things are significantly more absurd than I’d imagined.

Some guy named Richard Dawkins apparently invented the word “meme”, which he defines by saying:

“Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leading from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.

Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking — the meme for, say, ‘belief in life after death’ is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of people all over the world.”