memesis: meme-x and memetics
introductionary statements: grant, lezard, vajk

glenn grant [Gran90]:

meme [pron. meem]: a contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern [term coined by dawkins, by analogy with 'gene']. individual slogans, catch-phrases, melodies, icons, inventions, and fashions are typical memes. an idea or information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, to repeat it to someone else. all transmitted knowledge is memetic.

tony lezard [Leza??]:

richard dawkins, who coined the word in his book the selfish gene [Dawk76] defines the meme as simply a unit of intellectual or cultural information that survives long enough to be recognized as such, and which can pass from mind to mind. there's not much of a sense of describing thought processes, but nor is it just a model. as richard dawkins writes [this is from memory], "god indeed exists, if only as a pattern in brain structures replicated across the minds of billions of people throughout the world" - of course the patterns aren't physically identical, but they represent the same thing.

peter j. vajk [Vajk89]:

it is important to note here that, in contrast to genes, memes are not encoded in any universal code within our brains or in human culture. the meme for vanishing point perspective in two-dimensional art, for example, which first appeared in the sixteenth century, can be encoded and transmitted in german, english or chinese; it can be described in words, or in algebraic equations, or in line drawings. nonetheless, in any of these forms, the meme can be transmitted, resulting in a certain recognizable element of realism which appears only in art works executed by artists infected with this meme.

introductionary statements on memes: grant, lezard, vajk dawkins, moritz rezabek, speel watt forste, sandberg, borkman, henson