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The point of the story is that I went back to school and infected my friends with the skill, and it then spread around the school with the speed of measles and pretty much the same epidemiological time course. I don't know whether the epidemic subsequently jumped to other schools (a boarding school is a somewhat isolated backwater of the meme pool). But I do know that my father originally picked up the Chinese-junk meme during an almost identical epidemic at the same school 25 years earlier. The earlier virus was launched by the school matron. Long after the old matron's departure, I had reintroduced her meme to a new cohort of small boys.
I am occasionally accused of having backtracked on memes, of having lost heart, pulled in my horns, had second thoughts. The truth is that my first thoughts were more modest than some memeticists might wish. For me the original mission was negative. The word was introduced at the end of a book that otherwise must have seemed entirely devoted to extolling the "selfish" gene as the be-all and end-all of evolution, the fundamental unit of selection. There was a risk that my readers would misunderstand the message as being necessarily about DNA molecules. On the contrary, DNA was incidental. The real unit of natural selection is any kind of replicator, any unit of which copies are made, with occasional errors, and with some influence or power over their own probability of replication. Perhaps we'd have to go to other planets to discover any other examples. But maybe we didn't have to go that far. Could it be that a new kind of Darwinian replicator was even now staring us in the face? This was where the meme came in.
But I was always open to the possibility that the meme might one day be developed into a proper hypothesis of the human mind. I did not know, before I read Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett and then Susan Blackmore's new book, The Meme Machine, how ambitious such a thesis might turn out to be. Dennett vividly evokes the image of the mind as a seething hotbed of memes. He even goes so far as to defend the hypothesis that "human consciousness is itself a huge complex of memes..."
When the meme began, in The Selfish Gene in 1976, the message was a negative one: genes aren't the only pebbles on the Darwinian beach. In 1998, in Unweaving the Rainbow, I could be more positive: "There is an ecology of memes, a tropical rainforest of memes, a termite mound of memes. Memes don't only leap from mind to mind by imitation, in culture. That is just the easily visible tip of the iceberg. They also thrive, multiply and compete within our minds. When we announce to the world a good idea, who knows what subconscious quasi-Darwinian selection has gone on behind the scenes inside our heads? Our minds are invaded by memes, as ancient bacteria invaded our ancestors' cells and became mitochondria. Cheshire Cat-like, memes merge into our minds, even become our minds."
Richard Dawkins is Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His latest book is Unweaving the Rainbow (Houghton Mifflin). This essay was adapted from his introduction to Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (Oxford University Press)