Memes, Genes, and Brain Viruses

The video revives Richard Dawkins’ original notion of memes as cultural replicators—behaviors, ideas, or styles that spread from brain to brain—while connecting it to modern internet “brain viruses” like viral videos, tweets, and TikToks.

Drawing on Dawkins’ idea of “universal Darwinism,” the video generalizes evolution beyond genes to any system with heredity, variation, and selection, including cultural memes.

While both genes and memes evolve through selection, the video emphasizes that they introduce variation in fundamentally different ways, with important implications for cultural evolution.

The video uses bicycles as a concrete example of how technological artifacts reflect the evolution of underlying memes—design ideas, manufacturing techniques, and usage norms—that replicate across people and societies.

Internet memes—GIFs, videos, tweets, TikToks, copypasta—are digital instantiations of memes that replicate as bits across global networks, with recommendation algorithms acting as powerful selection forces.

Modern generative AI systems—image models, large language models, and early video generators—are portrayed as meme machines, both built from memes and producing new ones that circulate in human and digital cultures.

As a live demonstration of memetic dynamics, the video invites viewers to participate in a comment-section experiment creating and mutating “motes”—emoji or ASCII-art pictures within YouTube comments.