Love Island & ‘The Selfish Meme’

In his book, The Selfish Gene, biologist Richard Dawkins coined a term that has since joined the common lexicon: i.e. meme. A meme is a ‘unit of cultural transmission’, sort of like a non-biological gene. ‘Cultural transmission’, he writes, ‘is analogous to genetic transmission in that, although basically conservative, it can give rise to a form of evolution’. A meme is thus another replicator, ensuring its survival ‘by virtue of those same qualities of pseudo-ruthlessness that successful genes display’:

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain

The premise of The Selfish Gene is that the unit of natural selection is not individuals or species, but rather genes, which succeed by programming ‘survival machines’ (animals, plants etc.) and acting in their own self-interest: ‘The genes are master programmers, and they are…