A unit of cultural replication. The concept was introduced by Richard Dawkins in his “The Selfish Gene” 1976 in analogy with the concept of a gene, the unit of biological replication. Memes, such as tunes, fashions, traditions, moral rules or … Continue reading
The idea of memes is disconcerting. What if culture – even consciousness itself – were nothing more than an artifact of the interaction of “selfish memes, ideas capable of replicating and co-evolving with supreme indifference to their impact on human … Continue reading
When a meme catches on, it may crystallize whole schools of thought. Take the “black hole” meme, for instance. As physicist Brandon Carter has commented in Stephen Hawkings’s A Brief History of Time: A Reader’s Companion: “Things changed dramatically when … Continue reading