As an analogy think about a dog chasing stick. The closer that the stick matches your criteria of a perfect chasing stick the more likely it is to be used in this way. The stick knows nothing about this. Similarly what makes a story get passed on from one intelligent mind to another depends on the nature of the idea and how well it appeals to the minds of the vector, but the idea itself cares as little about this as the stick. What goes for sticks goes for rumours, and for religions.
Religions are the obvious memes to study because they are so powerful.
These memes get passed through the millennia, they inspire people to kill and die, they build Churches to protect themselves just as Dawkins described genes building and protecting themselves with the giant lumbering robots we know as bodies. I came across The Selfish Gene about three years ago, and it has changed my life. I started to use evolutionary analysis on everything. Last year I turned my attention to a new subject, the beliefs of hypothetical aliens. I agree with Richard Dawkins that the only way an alien civilization could exist is as a direct or indirect product of evolution.