Memetics 101
The Introduction page covers some basic concepts: that genes are not enough to explain diversity of our societies, that memes are ubiquitous, and that we can distinguish between genetic and memetic causes through a test of universality.
The second page in this section looks in more detail at the origin and idea of memes, and then we ask whether memes drove human evolution. We then look at four myths about memes.
We then take a bit more time to look at how memes originate by accidental and deliberate creation and a summary of how memes are transmitted (there's a lot more on this later in the site).
Most elements of our society are not single memes but complex groups of interlinked and mutually supporting memes - we'll follow Sue Blackmore's lead and call these memeplexes.
Memes have been with mankind before we developed speech, but their spread continues to accelerate rapidly - in the last section of the introduction I'll take a look at how they are flourishing in the modern world.
And finally, we have two bonus pages - the article that kicked this whole thing off (Sue Blackmore's excellent "Meme, myself I" from 1969), and a piece by me looking how thousands of people were convinced that tigers roamed the streets of London.
Start with the Introduction