2JP Twenty years ago, in his best-selling book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins explained how biological evolution proceeds not in the interests of the species, nor even the individual, but the genes.
All life evolves by the differential survival of slightly inaccurate self-replicating entities.
On earth the replicators are genes and natural selection has produced the fantastic complexity of the biological world. Then he asks whether there might be a second replicator on our planet. As examples he gives tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches . Some people dismiss memes as a meaningless metaphor but I believe memetics may prove as important to understanding the mind as genetics has been to biology. Thinking memetically means taking an entirely new view on the world - the meme s eye view.