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Dr. Omed’s Horn Book: a Primer for Newbie Netizens
Lesson One: Lamarck and the Meme
Jean Baptiste Lamarck was a French natural scientist and philosopher who flourished in the late 18th century. He proposed a theory (a couple of generations before Darwin) of evolution by acquired characteristics rather than by natural selection (Darwin). The cartoon example of his idea would be that giraffes have long necks because their ancestors stretched them little by little reaching for those hard to reach fruit, and passed on the longer necks they acquired by stretching to their offspring. The Darwinian cartoon (natural selection) would be that the giraffes with short necks starved, and thus had no offspring, and the giraffes with the longest necks (due to random genetic mutation) got the most food and had lots of offspring, thus propagating genes for longer necks.
Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976) proposed that while biological evolution was best modeled by Darwinian natural selection, Lamarckian evolution by acquired characteristics fit human cultural evolution to a tee. He invented a neologism (new word) "Meme" playing both on "gene" and "memory," meaning a unit of cultural information imbedded in a human mind or artifact, equivalent to a gene, which is a unit of hereditary biological information imbedded in our chromosomes. | 
