A year before I was born, zoologist Richard Dawkins coined the term Meme. At the time, it was novel. He proposed that ideas or behaviors, like genes, were subject to natural selection and could respond to the same environmental pressures and influences that biological units do. He defined a meme as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." That's a pretty abstract definition, but it's grown a lot since the 70s. People have even tried to consciously engineer memes to combat other memes they perceived as dangerous or damaging.

Now, almost everything from religions to web links to livejournal polls gets called a meme. If you're trying to put together a one-size-fits-all explanation of human cognition -- or just come up with an easy way to dismiss your opponent's ideas as brainwashed delusions -- memetics looks like a very nice hammer and other peoples' ideas look very much like nails. The idea that any thought they have, any belief, any argument, any practice, is just the behavioral equivalent of natural selection leads to a certain smug certainty. "Well, sure, you believe that cows are sacred -- that's because eating them would be unsustainable in your region, thus the sacred-cow meme evolved and survived..." And so on and so on.

The idea of 'memes' is in and of itself a meme, of course, making for a nice snake-eats-its-tail sort of rhetorical scenario. It can be used to critique any idea but it seems to me that practitioners rarely look that deeply. Dawkins' original formulation ("memes" as units of cultural transmission or imitation) is broad enough that it really just provides a convenient handle for something slippery. Religions are, in fact, big collections of memes. so is science, so is grammar, so are things like "consciousness" and "natural selection" itself.

Not everyone abuses the 'meme' meme in the way I've seen above, but it seems to be growing and generating a backlash. Like trendy hipsters who see their favorite band's influence everywhere, hardcore memetics people tend to see everything through that particular lens.

It's useful, this 'meme' concept, but can abuse of it be stopped? Maybe every useful idea has to go through a phase like this.