ABSTRACT
The creation of a worldwide network of computers, with tens of millions of users in the United States alone, has created an opportunity for little stories like the Nike commercial to gain a life of their own and to persist and spread long after their newsworthiness has faded. The story and the Nike slogan “Just do it” itself are good examples of successful cultural traits, little snippets of information that, for some reason or another, are successfully motivating people to copy them again and again. The theory of memetics has one implication that may warm the hearts of those who are made uncomfortable by selfish-gene theory. Although memetics has produced some useful new insights and some sophisticated theorizing about the interactions between genes and cultural traits in human evolution, it is running on a track parallel to most of the evolutionary biological study of human behavior.
