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(In »From semiotics via memetics to the collapse of militant atheism«)

Memetics simply strives to construct an evolutionary model not just for natural but also for cultural information transfer. A meme is quite simply the cultural gene, a package of information, a kind of cultural unit – for example an idea, a technology, a belief or a pattern of behaviour – which is lodged in a mind or a medium and which cannot reproduce itself through producing copies of itself and transferring itself between different minds and media. The meme’s reproductive success is conditional upon people’s ability and desire to imitate each other and thus pick up new thoughts and behaviour. This means that we no longer regard communication as primarily something that concerns an individual who is trying to influence another individual in a certain direction, but instead as a flow of selfish memes that reproduce themselves to the best of their abilities by travelling from mind to mind via various accessible media and making themselves at home the moment they find a receptive environment in the form of a brain furnished with various sets of compatible meme clusters, called memeplexes.