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Re: ::scr clue

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.

No, I'm afraid you're wrong. Dawkins definitely coined the word 'meme'. He chose it because a) it sounded like gene and b) because of the french word même (circumflexes munged for some no doubt) meaning same

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.

Again, I think you're wrong. I don't believe there is a prior attempt to formulise the units of cultural transmission and I don't recall any attempts by Dawkins to point any out in The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype or The Blind Watchmaker (sorry I haven't read any of the later ones as, by all accounts, they're much the same book and Dawkins is by now much less Dawkins the Scientist than Dawkins the, er, Meme). What Dawkins did go to great lengths to point out is that the selfish gene was not his idea alone but actually reflected the "synthesis", basically what had at the time just become orthodox evolutionary biological thought of which the big daddy was Maynard Smith (still going strong - http://www.biols.susx.ac.uk/home/John_Maynard_Smith/ )

On the contrary, the memes described in the book are smaller still to
closely parallel the size of genes.

Ok, this time you are right.

"Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leading from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.
Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, 'belief in life after death' is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of people all over the world."
from http://maxwell.lucifer.com/virus/alt.memetics/what.is.html


However the meme is itself just a meme and it no longer belongs to Dawkins. It has become not only an exciting (although as yet unproven) new academic discipline but also a catchphrase for a generation which depending on your point of view is either memeingfull or memeingless[0]. Does the word in this instance really mean anything more than fad? Is our understanding of the phenomena any deeper for using meme than it would be from just skim-reading a colour supplement synopsis of flimsy-but-self-tipping-point-generating "The Tipping Point"?

[0] copyright Andy McFarland