dawkins

Meme: an information pattern, held in an individual's memory, which is capable of being copied to another individual's memory.
Memetics: the theoretical and empirical science that studies the replication, spread and evolution of memes

Via  Principia Cybernetica

People often ask, "What is a Meme?" so here's a more than a little information on that. I pronounce it so it's rhymes with 'dream'; some pronounce it so it sounds like 'mem' (from mem-ory). (Via The Daily Meme)

First off, technically most of the sites here are not memes. The fact that most of these sites create new questions all the time removes the whole evolving viral concept of a meme. But most people call them that and I liked the word 'meme' so I used meme.

I found a pretty amusing "email" to Richard Dawkins about his perceptions of the world: aetheism, memetics, evolution, etc. Check it out -- thanks to Fred Butler's Richard Dawkins' post box

Some very cool wordy over at Eclectics Anonymous in the article Evolution Works, Shit Happens.

Richard Dawkins introduced the term after writing that evolution depended not on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmission — in the case of biological evolution, the gene. For Dawkins, the meme exemplifies another self-replicating unit, and most importantly, one which he thought would prove useful in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.

WAX ON THE FUTURE has some problems with memetics, especially the concept of "religion is a cultural virus." The way I see it, even if God exists, the transmission of His word is still memetic. To say that religion is memetic does not automatically disprove spirit or the devine. The enculturation of science is memetic, which doesn't disprove science. Memes are neutral, agnostic, and the messenger. Remember not to kill the messenger.

I first became interested in memes when working at an Ethology major at Princeton in 1980. Of course I read Dawkins and wrote an essay against his reductinist beliefs.

I thought, if behavior could have repetitive, mechanistic qualities, what about thought. What if things are not quite as lofty and a bit more work a day when it comes to the way we think, or just transmit knowledge. Or what if behavior is closer to thinking than we think.

"One of the subjects that fascinated him was meme theory, the concept of
self-replicating cultural information made famous by Richard Dawkins in
his book The Selfish Gene. Peretti set out to create one," via The Star