My very own memetics meme

Back in 1994, almost 20 years after Richard Dawkins coined the word "meme", I was a postgrad student of philosophy, and I dashed off the following message to a new memetics newsgroup. It has since been repeated endlessly, and seems to have become a standard, if informal, truism within the field of memetics, often quoted alongside Dawkins himself. Nothing very insightful about it, but it demonstrates how easy it is to make a name for yourself in a field that is sufficiently immature. My very own meme.

Memes, like genes, vary in their fitness to survive in the

environment of human intellect. Some reproduce like bunnies, but are very

short-lived (fashions), while others are slow to reproduce, but hang around

for eons (religions, perhaps?). Note that the fitness of the meme is not

necessarily related to the fitness that it confers upon the human being who

holds it. The most obvious example of this is the "Smoking is Cool" meme,

which does very well for itself while killing off its hosts at a great

rate.

Lee Borkman

School of Philosophy

University of New South Wales

1994