English biologist Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, etc.) proposed the idea of "memes," self-replicating packages of information that progagate themselves across the ecologies of mind in a pattern of reproduction similar to viruses. The parallel structure in biology is the gene. In chaos theory, it is the fractal. (If you are not already conversant with memetics, see Brodie and Lynch in the Book Reviews section, as well as the Journal of Memetics. There are many, many references on the Internet; for a quick summary go to the outline of Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science edited by Robert Aunger which lays out many of the questions.

Memes reproduce themselves; they interact with their surroundings and adapt to them; they mutate; they persist; and they defend themselves against each other. Memes evolve to fill the empty niches in their local environments which are, in this case, the surrounding belief systems and cultures of their natural hosts, namely, us.

They are transmitted in conversation, via the mass media, in literature, and politics. They take the form of simple concepts and complicated social movements. The Internet is a meme transmitter at the grand scale; the Disney Company is almost as good. Even the memeticists are spreading a meme -- the meme meme. Check out Richard Brodie's Meme Central as a case study in their replication. In addition a visit to the UK Memes Central site and the Meme Lab, as well as Susan Blackmore Susan Blackmore with her colleagues who provide a wealth of memetics resources (though she is now more into consciousness studies than memetics). The most recent book and the one which does the most to connect the sort of thinking represented in SD with memetics is Robert Aunger's The Electric Meme. Also see Blackmore's excellent text, Conscious: An Introduction for an overview of that realm.

While fascinating, most discussions of memetics still center around "little" memes. Even analyses of memetics in terms of cultural development lack an organizing principle for the bio-psyco-social components - the human nature chunk. So what we are watching is the birth of cyber rhetoric and the study of information dissemination in an elegant new way, but without some necessary information about the glue that binds memes together. The memetics folks are getting closer, but are still missing the boat. As displayed in Aunger's book, they are beginning to ask the necessary questions to get aboard.

Intriguing as they are, memes are subject to a still deeper set of organizing principles. There is a broader pattern to the currents and eddies in this stream of ideas. That pattern could well be, as you might guess, Spiral Dynamics^® (along with the several dozen other viable approaches to the emergent process of human thought). It is in the flowing process of evolving human consciousness that memes float. Once memeticists agree on a set of underlying principles that can frame the deepest forces, they'll have a foundation upon which to build a powerful discipline.

One connector which makes sense of the migration of memes and their cultural impact  is the ^vMEME (the value systems meme attractor described in Spiral Dynamics^®)*. These awakening ^vMEMEs establish the deep mindsets and worldviews to which memes attach or from which they are repelled. They are the scaffolding on which the constructs of the mind are built. We stand on our platforms of ^vMEMEs to observe the world and report the "reality" as we see it.

The broken link in most memetic analyses is the why question. Most people do a respectable job identifying the what and describing the how as memes move around, and even how social units shift in response. But why do some memes "take" and others drift into oblivion? A meme that does not fit the active ^vMEMEs is often ignored. When the meme does fit the awakened ^vMEMEs, it becomes part of the memetic package and endures. It may then sufficiently influence the milieu that a shift in ^vMEMEs ensues as part of the spiral to more complex conceptions of being. Its lifespan is a function of both the meme's own power and the forces at work in the milieu. It is at this level that Spiral Dynamics^® offers the memetic discussion something really quite new to think about.

* The term ^vMEME (or vMeme) is an effort to show the connection between (a) the ideas carried in memes and (b) the underlying thinking systems, value systems, worldviews, coping systems, Spiral colors, or Gravesian levels of psychological existence. Some people who should know better still insist on confusing the two domains. We think that is lazy scholarship and arrogance, a distorted approach which dilutes and confuses the meanings of both concepts. Memes and ^vMemes are not the same thing. 

The term ^vMeme was created with the writing of the book, SD, and postdates Dr. Graves' work by a decade. It was used because the Gravesian term, "Value System" (a bio-psycho-social system that frames life priorities and worldviews and vistas on reality), is easily confused with values (the beliefs and ethical frames that set priorities and express moralities). The language is clumsy. We simply couldn't come up with a good, new word. Since memetics theory does add understanding to how these energy fields flow and spread, it made sense to begin with "meme" and then expand on it with the superscript "v" to suggest an attractor, a "value-system super-meme." The Graves/SD theory does quite well without this language at all, and it might well confuse as much as it illuminates. The failure to distinguish memes from vMemes is sloppy, and those who pretend to understand the theory should know the difference.