memesis: meme-x and memetics
start into memetix

memetics is a whole new school of thought which studies the spreading and transmission of 'memes' - ideas, thoughts, tunes, catch-phrases, fashions, beliefs, etc: self-replicating information patterns, which in some ways can be analogized on the cultural level with genes on the biological level - by viewing them as being living organisms.
as such memetics attempts to extend darwinian evolution to culture.
 

memetic overview

oxford zoologist richard dawkins is credited with first publication of the term and concept of meme [Dawk76], although such ideas are not original with him. a meme thereby is viewed as a unit of mental information in the same way that a gene is a unit of biological information - a metaphor of an idea as a transposon, a pattern of thought as a virus, a knowledge structure as a chromosome. it is argued that memes compete to spread their information through a social population in the same ways genes compete to spread their information content through a biological population.
 

richard dawkins

history of memetic approaches

at present memetics is somewhat controversial. partly this is due to misunderstandings about what it means ['meme' is in danger of suffering the same fate as 'paradigm']. it is used to denote, variously, neural structures, cultural artefacts, practices, economic systems, religions, concepts, phenotypic traits, self-awareness, and epigenetic predispositions. memes are thought by some to control behaviour, by others to be acquired through a choice or act of will. the term gets applied to all levels of social and cultural structure, from minimal semantic entities like phonemes, through more molecular entities like phrases and snatches of music, to entire traditions and worldviews. in this blooming buzzing confusion, the usefulness of memes as a category is being lost or degraded, although this will eventually change in time, as the field matures.
 

lexicon: meme

[it is interesting to note that the idea of a meme is itself a meme and therefore, according to gödel's incompleteness theorem, cannot be proven objectively, vide Cost91]. if you have ever heard the idea of "a chicken is an egg's way of making another egg" and you understand it, then this is basically the same thing applied to ideas. confused? don't worry, it will make more sense after reading one of the introductory articles.
 

gödel's incompleteness theorem

introductory articles

in any event, the meme 'meme' has become endemic in the net, making dawkins a kind of intellectual typhoid mary [an idea which fails to propagate beyond the person who first thinks of it is not a meme].

memetic overview