From: Cheryl _ avonsgirl@yahoo.com.au
What are memes exactly? Genes shape our physiology and specify psychological traits - are memes fixed within our personalities or are they malleable?
Memes, if you believe in them (and not everyone does by a long chalk) are the virtual genes of culture, self-replicating viruses of the mind passing from mind to mind, combining, mutating, evolving. The word was coined in The Selfish Gene (Dawkins, 1976), though Dawkins owed much to the concept of 'thought contagion' propagated by Cloak (1973). Before that, Barthes in the 60s was talking about an 'autonomy of myth' - he may or may not have influenced Cloak.
Memes are not part of us in the sense that we are born with them, as we are with our genes. They come to inhabit our minds. They need us to replicate and pass themselves on to other minds, just as we need them to make sense of the world around us. They may or may not be good for us. Have you ever had a tune that you really hated lodged in your mind, playing itself over and over despite all your efforts to suppress it? That's a successful meme. So is a really scrummy recipe that you've cooked over and over because you like it.
A meme doesn't have to be 'true', as thousands of urban legends prove. Success, for a meme, depends on replication, which in turn depends on popularity. The truth is frequently very unpopular.
Memes, like genes, are prone to error in duplication. They mutate. The successful mutations are transmitted, the unsuccessful ones fail to make it into other minds and wither away. Infinitely recombinable, memes aggregate into memeplexes, complex groups of memes. The Robin Hood meme, the Dirty Dozen meme and the Magnificent 7 meme, along with other memes from pulp era science fiction stories, wartime propaganda, Boys Own adventures and whoever knows what else might all have come together to form the memeplex we call Blake's 7. The very name 'Blake' might spring from another meme, which may be William or Sexton or possibly both. It's often hard to be sure exactly which memes are involved in a particular memeplex (Terry Nation wasn't too sure himself) though it's fun to speculate.
Neil