On Viral Sentences and Self-Replication Structures
By Douglas R. Hofstadter
"In 1976, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins published his book The Selfish Gene, whose last chapter develops this theme...Dawkins' name for the unit of replication and selection in the ideosphere--the ideosphere's counterpart to the biosphere's gene--is meme, rhyming with "theme" or "scheme". As a library is an organized collection of books, so a memory is an organized collection [of] memes..Dawkins writes:
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students...memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle....
Dawkins takes care here to emphasize that there need not be an exact copy of each meme, written in some universal memetic code, in each person's brain. Memes, like genes are susceptible to variation or distortion--the analogue to mutation. Various mutations of a meme will have to compete with each other, as well as with other memes...some memes will tend to discredit others, while some groups of memes will tend to be internally self-reinforcing."
