>> we're like droplets of meme pooling together to form ponds of story:

>

>> coffee is good.
>> mowing the lawn.
>> driving a car to work.
>> putting on some pants.
>> combing your hair.
>> operating a jet fighter.
>> sitting on a toilet.
>> planting a sacred tree.
>> reading a book.

>

>> plenty of cultural meme meaning there; open to the infection.

>>>> "chazwin"
>>>> Once again - so fucking what?
>>>> Meme theory offers nothing in explanation.
>>>> It does not say why memes arise and cannot suggest why they decline.

>
> Try reading:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
>
> Lot's of answers to your "so fucking what?"
>
> "In response to these criticisms, memeticists might argue that as their
> discipline does not construe memes as "particulate" entities, they therefore
> parallel indirectly the entirety of existing evolutionary taxonomy. (For
> example, one would not preclude fish from the animal kingdom for their lack
> of lungs.)
> The author Evan Louis Sheehan, on the other hand, does attempt to rigorously
> portray the cognitive representations of memes as "particulate" entities. He
> defines them as patterns captured in cortical hierarchies, identical in
> structure to what Jeff Hawkins proposes in his book On Intelligence (2004).
> Each hierarchy expresses a complex pattern that the brain-owner has
> automatically sensed and remembered, as a consequence of simple Hebbian
> learning. "Sensed patterns" captured in these cortical hierarchies can
> reflect anything from the shape of a tree to a commonly-performed pattern of
> behavior that routinely propagates through mimicry. A cortical hierarchy
> consists of a "molecular" entity, constructed from sub-hierarchies (as the
> pattern of a tree comprises the sub-patterns of leaves, branches and a
> trunk), which themselves ultimately comprise "atomic" entities - small,
> patterned combinations of sensory elements. Memes thus take on a
> "particulate" nature that allows their combination and re-combination in
> various ways. Sheehan, in his book The Mocking Memes: A Basis for Automated
> Intelligence builds a model of creative thinking around a rapidly-evolving
> Darwinian process of combining and re-combining various causal memes, which
> represent nothing more than remembered patterns of causality.
>
> Sheehan describes a meme as any sort of pattern that serves as a template
> for its own replication. He suggests that an understanding of memetics
> requires a recognition of how such patterns get themselves automatically
> translated - according to the strict laws of physics - from substrate to
> substrate, as from patterns of light entering a human eye to patterns of
> neural excitations in the retina of that eye, to the Hebbian development of
> hierarchical patterns of neural connections in the cortex, and ultimately to
> patterns of muscle contractions that serve to mimic the witnessed behaviors
> of others.

>
> Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, in a debate with
> theologian Alister McGrath, has responded to criticism regarding the lack of
> rigor in the study of memetics by claiming that words and similar means of
> spreading and holding ideas provide a clear model for the spread and storage
> of memes. Sheehan suggests the automatic translation of patterns among
> various substrates as critical to providing the means for spreading and
> holding patterns of words and ideas. For example, we speak words through
> vibrational patterns of the larynx, which get translated to pressure waves
> in air, which then get translated to vibrations of a listener's ear drum,
> which then get translated to waves of cochlear fluid inside the inner ear,
> which then get translated to patterns of neural firings, which then get
> translated to patterns of neural connections, thereby establishing a memory
> of the spoken words in the listener's mind.

> constant flitting of memetic patterns from one substrate to another makes
> memes so difficult to pin down, as analogous to genes, but that the physical
> processes that translate memetic patterns from substrate to substrate
> exhibit an usually high level of fidelity.
>
> According to Sheehan, "automatic translations of patterns from substrate to
> substrate to substrate, and back again, provide looping pathways by which
> patterns can iteratively replicate, mutate and evolve." Sheehan claims that
> "many such looping pathways exist both within a single brain (to create an
> intelligent mind) and among many brains (to create culture, language and
> technology)."
>
> Others suggest that many of the criticisms of memetic theory stem from
> confusion over what the term "gene" refers to. In microbiology,
> microbiologists see a "gene" as a cistron, a specific region of DNA. The
> analogy between memes and genes, however, relates to an evolutionary
> biologist's gene, an abstract replicatory unit of information. People[who?]
> who think of a gene as an actual visible piece of DNA often criticise the
> memetic analogy because of this. An example of such an "abstract replicatory
> unit of information" might code for the color of one's hair or for the
> length of a digit"