Evolution in the Widest Sense

A couple of fascinating essays by Susan Blackmore at NYT, here and here -- a transposition, if you will, of the evolutionary idea of "copying" and how it plays out in memetics, with particular reference to what Blackmore calls "temes" --- that is, technological memes, a way of describing the information explosion.

I haven't really digested these essays yet, but they're fascinating reading.

And, under the category of "first thoughts," what Blackmore is describing echoes quite strongly the mechanisms of folklore as described by Joseph W. Campbell in The Flight of the Wild Gander -- a tribal story travels to a neighboring tribe, is embellished with elements of their own history by the members of that tribe, and finds its way back to the original tribe with the embellishments. A sort of cultural equivalent to the way that genetic variation travels through populations in biological evolution.