Evolution requires not only inheritance and natural selection but also
variation, and memes also exhibit this property. Ideas may undergo
changes in transmission which accumulate over time. Generations of
hosts pass on these changes in the “phenotype” (the information in
brains or in retention systems). In other words, unlike genetic
evolution, memetic evolution can show both Darwinian and Lamarckian
traits. For example, folk tales and myths often become embellished in
the retelling to make them more memorable or more appropriate and
therefore more impressed listeners have a greater likelihood of
retelling them, complete with accumulating embellishments that may
serve to modify human behavior. More modern examples appear in the
various urban legends and hoaxes — such as the Goodtimes virus warning
— that circulate on the Internet.
Dawkins observed that cultures can evolve in much the same way that
populations of organisms evolve. Various ideas pass from one generation
to the next; such ideas may either enhance or detract from the survival
of the people who obtain those ideas, or influence the survival of the
ideas themselves. This process affects which of those ideas will
survive for passing on to future generations. For example, a certain
culture may have unique designs and methods of tool-making that another
culture may not have; therefore, the culture with the more effective
methods may prosper more than the other culture, ceteris paribus. This
leads to a higher proportion of the overall population adopting the
more effective methods as time passes. Each tool-design thus acts
somewhat similarly to a biological gene in that some populations have
it and others do not, and the meme's function directly affects the
presence of the design in future generations. Similarly, like the
biological evolutionary process, cultures can retain memes that once
served a purpose during one epoch or era as vestigial memes (a.k.a.
evolutionary misdirection) much like (debatably) the vermiform
appendix, or wisdom teeth in humans.
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