About

Living the Meme is a place where the evolution of new ideas may be explored. Aspects of mutation, replication, and ultimate adoption will be addressed in a technological, cultural and political realms.

What is a “meme”? Google can tell you lots, but the basics are as follows:

Meme was first introduced by Richard Dawkins in his book “the selfish gene”. It is meant to describe a unit of information that can be replicated, mutated, and passed on by the human mind.

Memes are cultural DNA. They make up practices, attitudes, traditions and beliefs that evolve into a set of shared behavior. They are not transcribed in base-pairs or nucleic acids, but in synapses. Some memes are highly conserved, others might be considered non-coding or junk. Do the memes serve us, or do we serve the memes?

Susan Blackmore has done a significant amount of work to develop the theory of memes, and even suggests further extension of the concept.