### social society | culture:

Meme
* are a new form of self-replicators, or viral life
  - acculturation
  - also interactors
  - an attempt at quantization of thought patterns
  - basic units of thought
  - contagious ideas, all competing for a share of our mind in a kind of Darwinian selection
  - cultural ideas that are passed through generations
  - essentially sets of instructions that can be followed to produce behavior
  - fixations which replicate via communication between host fixations
  - ideas or thoughts that spread among people, like infectious diseases
* are ideas that can be replicated, such as the transmission of culture
  - spread through human cultures and across the generations
  - information
  - like viruses of the mind
  - parasitic
  - simply ideas that demonstrate a high rate of survival and transmission
  - supposedly ideas that act like viruses and invade the brain
* are the information world's equivalent of genes
  - invisible DNA of human society, controlling all aspects of mind and culture
  - to cultural inheritance what genes are to biological heredity
  - topological sequences created via stocastic neural processes
* can be very compelling, in the same way that genes compel certain behaviors
  - replicate vertically or horizontally within a single biological generation
* compete to use human brains, books, TV and the Internet for their own selfish propagation.
* depend on environments created by genes.
* evolve by natural selection
  - in competition for niches in the belief-space of individuals and societies
* is culture
* live in our minds.
* only take minutes to replicate, and thus have potentially much higher fecundity.
* play a comparable role in understanding the evolution of imitated behaviors.
* reproduce by being copied in brains, and they are altered by copying errors
  - using the human mind and culture as their reproductive machinery
* run the gamut from essential symbionts to dangerous parasites.
* seem to get changed much more frequently than genes.
* tend to make copies of themselves and are therefore replicators , like genes.
+ Self-replication: Biological reproduction :: Technology

### social society | culture | meme:

Cultural meme
* are responsiblefor culture, religion, and other societal beliefs.
* rely on programming emotional responses into a person.

Mental culture
* is very essential for the prevention and maintenance of health as physical culture.
* takes up and carries forward what physical culture prepares for and begins.

Mexican culture
* Many Mexican cultures wear black to weddings and white to funerals.
* is everywhere
  - founded on church and family
* plays a vital role in the success of conducting business in Mexico.
* recognizes death as an implicit consequence of life.
* unique blend of thousands of years of human interaction.

Modern culture
* Many modern cultures see circumcision as normal for boys, but it is seen as odd for girls.
* exploit the natural world, and in so doing threaten their own long-term viability.
* have different customs for expressing the intent of Paul s command.
* is saturated with violence
  - the source of a crisis in civilization
* tend to try to force nature into doing what they want.