On The Theoretical And Practical Values Of Meme

The theory of meme or memetics is a new theory which is based on Darwin's evolutionary theory to reveal the law of cultural transmission. The core term in memetics is meme. A meme is a unit of cultural information, which mutates and is inherited like a gene and spreads like a virus from one person to another. If it is through the replication and some beneficial mutation of genes that the attributes of a population can be steadily kept going, then it is through the replication and the transmission of memes that human beings can be seen as human at all with a larger brain size than that of any other animals and with the uniqueness of having cultures and grammatical languages. The study of memetics is of great values, both theoretical and practical, for the study of cultural transmission and the evolution of language. Based on this awareness, this thesis sets out to give a brief review of the background of memetics with emphasis on its four central concepts, namely, replication; imitation; selfish meme and memetic drive, then attempts to apply the theory of memetics first to uncover the two mysteries of human nature related to language competence (Why does man have a brain of a larger size than that of other animals? Why does man alone produce and understand a grammatical language and have complex cumulative cultures?), and finally, perhaps more importantly, illustrates how a language has been evolving. It is found that changes and acceptance of new expressions in the course of language development can be attributed to the spread, replication and evolution of meme.