definition

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A meme is any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.

Karl Popper advocated memetic caution in the strongest possible
terms: “The survival value of intelligence is that it allows us to
extinct a bad idea, before the idea extincts us.”

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

Memetic engineering consists of the process of developing memes,
through meme-splicing and memetic synthesis, with the intent of
altering the behavior of others. It consists of the process of creating
and developing theories or ideologies based on an analytical study of
societies, their ways of thinking and the evolution of the minds that
comprise them. Attempts at Artificial Meme-Phrase Creation have not met
with noted success, though apocryphal stories tell of the putative
origins of these sorts of memes.

Memeticists often define an individual's mind as a “playground for
memes” or as an “ecology of memes”, where the different memes that have
colonized that mind at different times interact with each other. For
example, when a mind successfully infected by the memeplex for religion
X becomes exposed to the memeplex for religion Y, memeplex X may
repulse memeplex Y: X can block Y from infecting the mind (for instance
through use of such memetic components as the meme that “all other
religions besides X are evil”).

The scientific method offers a body of social and experimental
techniques which, given certain preconditions — a free press for the
circulation of information, a large number of people predisposed to see
the world as a mechanism subject to general regularities which humans
can observe, describe and model through repeatable experiments and/or
observations — acts highly virulently, spreading quickly through an
educated population as journals circulate and blogs proliferate. By
demonstrating its success at making predictions, science as a practice