Memes

What is a meme? A meme is an idea, or a particular way of thinking about what an idea is. A meme is a unit of mental information in the same way that a gene is a unit of biological information -- a metaphor of an idea as a transposon, a pattern of thought as a virus, a knowledge structure as a chromosome. Memes compete to spread their information though a social population in the same ways genes compete to spread their information content through a biological population.

Here is what Eric Watt Forste has to say about memes:

Human knowledge evolves by mechanisms similar to biological evolution: over the long run, by blind variation, accurate replication, and selective elimination. The term which encapsulates this metaphor with genes is "meme". A whole new school of thinking about knowledge is developing out of the confluence of meme idea on the one hand, and the pancritical epistemology of William Bartley and Sir Karl Popper.