My head has been buried in Biopunk philosophy lately.

Especially Dennett.

He says this about memes:

Humans are the only species where one individual can reason with another to alter the other individuals behavior. So whereas other animals actions are decided only by genes(and epigenomics and so on), the behavior of humans are decided by both genes and memes.

Some meme complexes have been honed by evolution and natural selection for centuries and have very powerful survival and replication mechanisms. They are powerful enough to kill the host in favor of the survival of meme complex. Examples would be democracy, religion, freedom and so on.

Dennett goes on to point out that genes are memes themselves. Genes are nothing but pieces of information that happen to be written in molecules. They don't even have to be written in that form, they can be written as letters and later be synthesized into DNA again. So genes are actually memes in the first place. So it's all memes. Behavior is decided by memes.

I've been pondering this for weeks.

-Splicer