- How do you pronounce
"meme"?
- "Meem" (rhymes with "dream")
- Memes are the basic building
blocks of our minds and culture, in the same way that genes are the
basic building blocks of biological life.
- Isn't memetics just a
fancy name for _________ (fill in the blank with "cultural
evolution", "behavioral psychology",
"sociobiology", or anything else)? Why is this anything new?
- The breakthrough in
memetics is in extending Darwinian evolution to culture. There are
several exciting conclusions from doing that, one of which is the
ability to predict that ideas will spread not because they are
"good ideas", but because they contain "good memes"
such as danger, food and sex that push our evolutionary buttons and
force us to pay attention to them.
- Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins is credited
with first publication of the concept of meme in his 1976 book The
Selfish Gene.
clipped from: www.memecentral.com