You can think of a "meme" as an shared "big idea".  The main thing about a meme is that it is shared between minds (2) - the more minds the better. The idea is that memes compete with each other and survive at the expense of their "hosts", who are "infected" with memes, such as (Dawkins' favorite example), religion. Late in life, Dawkins still pushes this idea and it still gains some traction. There is an attractive analogy between genes and memes, spelled out explicitly when Dawkins introduced the idea [1] and swallowed up by "Surfaces and Essences" as just another example of analogy making -- perhaps one that doesn't get to the "essence" of the phenomenon of "ideas". In this blog, I will use the word "meme" sparingly to refer to basic powerful ideas such as the "Self", "Reality" and "God". It turns out that we don't get very far by thinking of these ideas as &quo