Happy Birthday Meme

The "meme" meme has successfully gotten itself entrenched in the memepool. It is spreading rapidly around the human species at the speed of light, and it will one day have infected everyone's mind. Its reproductive success is a testimony to its infectious power. There is something about the "meme" meme that makes it a good replicator. It fits in well with the other memes that inhabit our minds, and there is something about it that makes us want to communicate it to other people. We are enabling its survival.

Memes offer us a way to understand our psychology and the evolution of our thoughts, technology, artifacts, music, and art. They can be defined as small sets of instructions that produce behavior. When enough of these instructions get together in a brain, a mind develops. Such a mind can be understood and predicted by looking at its composite memes.












With its explanatory power, and its potential to make behavioral predictions, memetics will become an essential addition to a psychologist's tool kit. As its success increases, memetics will take over where psychology has left off, and will become a driving force in the study of human behavior.

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