What Is a Meme?

"There's lots of good reasons for things you do every day that you've never thought of," says evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. "They don't have to understand the reasons for this, they just do it." We haven't talked about memes at all, which are informational viruses that govern infectious habits, he adds. But we're willing to die for meme complexes, that is memes made of memes like freedom, democracy, and truth. Some memes are absolutely parasitic and suicidal to us,. writes David Wheeler.