But Dawkins ended The Selfish Gene with a new thought of his own. This dumb process applies to anything that is selectively copied. Ideas, habits, skills, words, stories and songs are all selectively copied when we humans imitate each other. So they too must evolve. He called them memes.
Memes compete to use human brains, books, TV and the Internet for their own selfish propagation.
Sometimes they succeed because they are good or useful, but sometimes just because they are clever at getting replicated - like religions or urban myths. From the trivial, like chain letters and school crazes, to the very fabric of our culture, like languages, political systems, science and technology - they are all the results of memetic competition. I read The Selfish Gene long ago, but only recently got infected with the meme meme. Since then it's been busily transforming my view of the world and using me to get itself spread. Susan Blackmore is Reader in Psychology at the University of the West of England, Bristol.