3
s tances and churning out copies of themselves until the last 35,000
years.
Dawkins calls these new replicators memes.
Genes, says Dawkins, swam through the protoplasmic soup of
the early earth, nourishing themselves on organic sludge.  Memes float
through another kind of sea--a sea of human brains.  Memes are ideas,
the snatches of nothingness that leap from mind to mind.  A melody
wells up in the reveries of a solitary songwriter.  It seizes the brain of a
singer. Then it infects the consciousness of millions.  That melody is a
meme.  A scientific concept starts as a vague glimmer in one
researcher's thoughts.  It ends up with whole schools of adherents.
That concept is a meme.  Each flips from the puddle of one brain to
another, crazily copying itself in the new environment.  But the memes
that count the most are the ones that assemble vast arrays of resources
in startling new forms.  They are the memes that construct social
superorganisms.
Genes sit at the center of each cellular blob, dictating the
construction of a multi-billion-celled body like you and me.  As genes
are to the organism, so memes are to the superorganism, pulling
together millions of individuals into a collective creature of awesome
size.
Memes stretch their tendrils through the fabric of each human
brain, driving us to coagulate in the cooperative masses of family, tribe
and nation.  And memes--working together in theories, worldviews or
cultures--can make a superorganism very hungry.
From 1852 to 1864, Karl Marx sat alone nearly every day in a
corner of the library of the British Museum, going through books and
assembling his theories.2  Little did he realize it, but the bearded writer
was simply the tool of fragmentary memes.  Those ideas had been
floating in the zeitgeist, waiting for a receptive human mind to come
along and function as an enzyme functions in human
metabolism--splicing together molecules destined for each other.  Marx
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