Word: memes
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...exist to comprehend it. There is no way to wrap our heads around the concept of our demise, and thus most religions, in their many guises, offers us a way out of this logical impasse by offering a solution: we never die. Or, more accurately, those who share the meme will not die. Aye, and here is where the replication comes in. Those harboring the little virus of the mind will attempt to spread it to those they know and care about, as they want their friends and relatives to share in the afterlife bonanza...
...idea of perfectibility by abortion is an odious meme that should have vanished with Dr. Mengele. But instead, it has survived and prospered. Instead of being tried as a war criminal, the idea ends up being validated by a French court. It ends up, in fact, as a chief option of what might be called the Hubristic Scientific Override, the mechanism whereby human expertise may correct the blunders of the genes...
...overwhelming power--demands the kind of changes that Jospin's government is trying to make, even as it offers the proud French a new forum in which to practice their tenacious belief in France's own special destiny. Plus ca change, one might say, plus c'est la meme chose...
Farming, which took shape in the Old World around 8,000 B.C. and in the New World a few millenniums later, is a much misunderstood meme. Anthropologists sometimes call it an "energy technology," since food does, after all, energize us; but farming may have originally mattered more as a kind of information-processing technology. By radically increasing the human population that a given acre could support, farming sped up the synergistic exchange of cultural information, lubricating innovation; it packed lots of neurons together, raising both the size and the efficiency of social brains...
...distant cities became linked through commerce (much of it orchestrated by written contract), culture acquired a kind of disaster insurance. Any valuable meme--the concept of the chariot or of coins--would spread so fast from city to city that it could survive any catastrophes that afflicted its birthplace. The world's data-processing system was getting better at making backup copies...