Yes.
I hadn't heard of memes before. But they actually explain alot. Especially the vertical kind that don't spread through inheritance. I've often wondered, for expample, how my adopted nephew could look and act so much like my cousin he never met. Or why I feel a certian connection to sometimes strangers. I could go on and on, I'm still processing.
The amazing thing about memes is how noone seems to have heard about them, and yet they are closer to us than the air that we breathe! Taking the "meme's eye view" is an amazing experience once you have a basic grasp of the concept. Just like understanding biological evolution can change how we view nature, make us see how we are all physically interconnected in one single, continous life process, memetics shows us even further how we are
literally interconnected in an even closer way to all culture and thoughts that exist in the world. As biological creatures we are used to being "far out" in the differentiated branches of the evolutionary tree, where we have long lives with slow and rare occations of procreation with a carefully selected (hopefully) partner. But memetically we are more like a colony of bacteria living on a lump of meat we call the brain; We live, die, recombine and reproduce promiscuosly all over the place, thousands of times per day!
The beauty is in how closely related we actually are to everyone else. It is not just metaphorically we can call people who share our ideas and values as "brothers" and "sisters". The more social we are, the less original we tend to be...for better and worse. On the other hand, the more widely we spread our social interactions to include foreign elements, the richer will our memetic "soup" become. It is no surprise that to develop a strong sense of self, we need to retreat from the rest of the world occationally and give space for those rare "off shore island species" that live inside us as potential seeds, but don't stand a chance with all the "rats" and other invasive creatures we find on the mainland.
I think the biggest "threat" from the idea of memes is that it challenges many peoples notion of "free will". Many people believe that because you want something that is not strictly a biological instinct, that makes it a free-floating autonomous descision. Memetics implies that there is no such "free will", unrelated and disconnected from nature, but there IS freedom in the sense of learning about how and why you make decisions, in other words, the true Will of thelema, which is the freedom to understand and want what you Will. Only, I haven't seen a memeticist put it that way yet...they should!
Makes a lot more sense than a lot of other theroies I've heard.
AW
It could be completely wrong though...but I'm sticking to it as long as nothing better shows up!
Please explain!
