::scr clue

[Tom Forwood]

>
> Dawkins' original concept of the meme, which he came up with in "The
> Selfish Gene" in 1976, was a fairly unworked idea - he simply proposed
> that we might have replicators which work for cultural frameworks in
> the same way that genes do for physical beings.
>

You are guilty (like pretty much everyone else who ever uses the term meme
of perpetuating the myth that Dawkins invented the concept and name of a
meme.  In fact as Dawkins points out in "The Selfish Gene" and many
susequent books is that the idea had been around for a while before.
Unfortunatly I cant quite remember who did think of it.

> Being Dawkins, I think he was thinking on a grander scale than the
> things which we tend to call memes today - he would prefer to consider
> the Bible as a meme, rather than the kitten/wanking joke, because it
> has had a far more profound, and inescapable effect on large swathes of
> human society. Whether we like it or not, many of our sexual
> attitudes, and even the structure of our entire week is dictated by
> ripples which have spread from the bible, for example.
>


On the contrary, the memes described in the book are smaller still to
closely parallel the size of genes.  One example he quotes is the practice
of inserting the word sake into “For auld langs eyne” (sorry my Scottish
isn’t quite up to spelling that any way other than phonetically).  He
proposed that the word spread because of the invasive sound of the sibilant
s and proposed for an experiment that people should start singing “God
saves our gracious Queen” to see how it would spread through the population.

In the memetic theory memes combine to form ideas on a par with organisms
(or organs) and then on to form cultures (ecosystems).