Richard Dawkins & Memes

[Rod Serling]

Without being too complicated and jargonisitic, can someboidy please tell me what Richrd Dawkins and memes is all about - as 2 sepearate entities - i went to Wikipedia but that presumes you know somethng about the the subject matter which I don't! Please enlighten me?

[LazyGun]

Richard Dawkins is a member of a school of thought that believes evolution depends upon a self-replicating unit of transmission, which in the biological case is the gene.

He has also speculated that you can have something culturally analogous to the gene when it came to social evolution, and he coined the term meme, short for some greek word i forget now.Basically, the idea is that these self -replicating bits of cultural information, the memes, spread throughout societies and cultures - these ideas and phenomena might be tunes, or beliefs, or fashion trends. These memes will then spread and evolve according to natural selection, again in an analogous fashion to biological reproduction.

It remains largely an academic concept I think.I am not expert in the field, but it is quite a nice idea.