Memes
07/07/2019
Once our brains have built the entrance and exit pathways for the vehicles of language, they swiftly become parasitized (and I mean that literally, as we shall see) by entities that have evolved to thrive in just such a niche: memes. The outlines of the theory of evolution by natural selection are clear: evolution occurs whenever the following conditions exist:
(1) variation: a continuing abundance of different elements
(2) heredity or replication: the elements have the capacity to create copies or replicas of themselves
(3) differential "fitness": the number of copies of an element that are created in a given time varies, depending on interactions between the features of that element (whatever it is that makes it different from other elements) and features of the environment in which it persists.
Notice that this definition, though drawn from biology, says nothing specific about organic molecules, nutrition, or even life. It is a more general and abstract characterization of evolution by natural selection.
...
This is a new way of thinking about ideas. It is also, l hope to show, a good way, but at the outset the perspective it provides is distinctly unsettling, even appalling. We can sum it up with a slogan:
A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.
-- (Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 1992, 200)