Biologists formed the theory of evolution of an explanation for the existence of life, or some 
might say, the existence of spontaneous order or intelligence in what appears to be an otherwise chaotic
environment (consistent physical laws or no).  Many biologists I have talked to about this theory
seem to see it as applying solely to life.  Yet, implicit in the theory is the idea that the dynamic
of evolution acted on "simpler" forms of matter to "create" life - it is essentially a postulate of the
theory of evolution that it applies more generally than only to life forms.
	Given this, my next question is: "What is required for the dynamics of evolution to assert themselves?".
One phrasing of it goes: evolution requires a differential of survival of a self-replicating structure.
I don't consider this a perfect definition.  Consider a system in which new "actors" with various 
characteristics are are continuously generated, and compete in some environment.  If a certain kind of
"actor" worked with similar "actors" to destroy other competitors, while all other competitors were passive,
there would be an evolutionary drift toward those "actors".  So perhaps a more useful definition would 
be "differential survival of continuously generated or replicated objects".   
	In any case, we can work with either definition, or with a mixture of these definitions, to explore
memic evolution: the evolution of ideas.  I had done 
a lot of thinking about how this would work when I suddenly ran into essentially the same idea in a book I 
was reading called 'The Selfish Gene' (Richard Dawkins).  The majority of this book was an exploration into
the genetic basis of altruism, but the final chapter was a kind of speculation about this new form of 
evolution of ideas.  Anyway, I'm stealing his terminology.  Memes, the parallel to genes from genetic 
evolution, are basically ideas.  As 
soon as you realize that memes replicate by being shared between brains, and that an idea misundertood or 
newly invented is essentially similar to a mutant gene, an immense amount of genetic evolution can be 
extrapolated into the evolution of ideas.  Before getting too carried away though, be very clear about what 
exactly is surviving here.  I'm not talking about people living or dying based on the memes they have: in 
modern America for instance, few people starve (percentagewise), and those not typically because of memes.
Having children and teaching them your memes is no more effective than convincing someone your memes 
are correct, and 
having children is a lot slower.  I'm talking about memes themselves surviving or disappearing in the meme 
pool, which is essentially the culture of a society.  The meme pool exists because there are billions of people 
in the world, interacting all over the place.
	What is the environment that memes evolve to survive in?  Just as rival genes form a large part of 
the environment for a particular gene, so 'rival' memes form a great deal of the environment for a particular 
meme.  Many ideas are mutually exclusive, and so memes can often be grouped into rival 'alleles' in a very 
similar way to genes.  What else is part of the environment that memes evolve in?  Clearly in our 
evolutionary system we have the brain evaluating memes in a very similar way to the way the environment 
'evaluates' genes.  The fact that other memes form a large part of the brain's selection of memes is not 
inconsistent with genetic evolution: all life forms but some bacteria and algae depend directly or indirectly on 
other life to survive.  For instance just as mathematics is useless without 1=1, predator genes are useless 
without prey.  The non-memetic factors of meme evolution that I can think of are a person's intelligence and 
chemical makeup, and certain psychological tendencies that are difficult to associate with memes, like 
aggressiveness.  The boundaries between these factors blur a great deal.  The parallel factors in genetic 
evolution are things like weather and terrain, which definitely select genes (consider Alaska and Tahiti), but 
are non-genetic.
	Given this parallelism, what can we bring over from genetics?  In genetic evolution genes for 
propagating genes tend to survive.  Similarly a meme for sharing memes should survive well because in 
sharing their other memes, people will always implicitly be sharing the meme for sharing memes.  A meme 
for fighting for your memes would also survive, and here we have the phrase "stick up for your beliefs".  For 
instance:  someone hears the meme "stick up for your beliefs" and absorbs/replicates it.  He will now stick 
up for his beliefs, one of which is to stick up for his beliefs.  A meme for pushing your personal versions of 
memes while 'pretending' to come from a large and popular pool of memes would also survive.  Here we 
have, for instance, the physicist talking to the chemist, expressing his own memes, but also occasionally 
saying something like "well of course I, being a physicist [jab to the ribs], would approach it this way..".
	There are also parallels to the evolution of groups of genes.  For instance, herbivore flattened 
grinding teeth go with herbavore stomachs and herbavore metabolic pathways.  A herbivore with a gene for 
the sharp teeth of a carnivore is not selected.  Similarly ideas can be incompatible.  For instance, a Christian 
would not happen to hold the philosophical meme such as "doubt all that you think you know" since this would 
be totally incompatible with the meme of faith.  Just as genes survive in groups and form a distinct *species*, 
we see memes surviving in groups that essentially define a *species of mind*.  So, for a little ego stroking, 
you can broaden your symbols slightly and can call yourself a different species of mind from Christians.
	Just as in evolution, what will survive is what is most stable.  The best way for a group of memes to 
become stable is to become as complete as possible: i.e. to explain as much as possible and to become 
resistant to the invasion of other sets of memes.  Other properties for meme-group stability would be that a 
few of the memes from the group imply most of the rest after some lateral thinking.  Your already thinking 
this, I'm sure, but please note that Christianity is an extremely stable group of memes.  We have the 
explanation for everything, the ability to fend off rival memes, and the ease of lateral thinking in such a 
simplistic system.  The fundamental tenet of Christianity, *faith* in God, is an extremely stable meme: it 
rejects *all other meme-groups* that do not contain faith.  It is no surprise that it is a part of most popular 
religions.
	If we blindly extrapolate the above, we might decide that all people should be Christian by now.  
However, just as a cactus, an extremely efficient life-form, survives only in the desert where there is a 
shortage of water, so Christianity survives only where there is a shortage of self-awareness and self-analysis.
Just as a cactus 
cannot compete in a lush environment, so Christianity cannot compete where people are too self-aware
to take the psychological hook.  In addition, certain intelligent, empirically oriented people will simply
reject the Christian myth.  As I see it, the more intelligent you are, the more 
unstable a meme-group you will subscribe to.  The most intelligent people tend to pick the most unstable meme 
group of all, which boiled down to the language of memes, is essentially, "avoid memetic stability".  Up to 
that point we have a scale of people like scientists who are also Christians, scientists who believe overmuch 
in their conclusions, scientists who recognize things to be at best theoretical, and then those who are ready 
to doubt thier own existence of reality and even more stable memes.  The scientific/empirical/logical meme 
group is stable partly because it offers an explanations for a great deal of the universe, and partly because
it fields many of the people who reject more stable but overly simple memes.
	Now I will qualify everything I just said.  Of course I do not expect a perfect correlation between 
intelligence and meme-group stability, or between instability and truth itself.  The effect of evolutionary
drift will always be expressed in standard-distributions and bell curves.  Everything in an evolutionary 
system is probabilistic.  There are *chances* that memes will spread, that they will be destroyed at their
inception, that they will be conquered by other memes.  Evolution works on a minor tendency in an incredibly
large pool extrapolated over a long period of time.  Probability enforces evolution.
	There are some decidedly non-parallel elements in the system as well.  For instance, one reason for 
the speed of meme evolution is that mutations of various degree happen every time an idea is transmittted, 
and none of these mutations are fatal as gene mutations usually are ( other than developing a meme for 
attacking everything you see ).  Also a meme which does not spread itself, even a meme for *not* spreading 
memes, does not immediately disappear.  It will continue to exist because it is continually created.  The only 
memes which really die out are those that are contrary to widely known and accepted memes, and even these 
'backward' memes will still exist in pockets.  The meme pool is a lot more forgiving than the gene pool.