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. From this viewpoint the ideas or behaviours themselves are doing the driving.
Memes fight it out to get into brains and to get passed on again, creating our minds as they go.
Try to stop thinking for just 30 seconds. Thinking uses precious energy, so you might expect natural selection to have made it easy to stop, but it hasn t. From the meme s eye viewpoint the answer is obvious. Memes that get endlessly repeated in your head are more likely to be passed on. So your head fills up with those sorts of memes - and so does everyone else s.