This is a word coined by Richard Dworkins to describe “the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” I used to call these things fads and sometimes ‘in vogue’ but I think he is aiming at an idea that may not be as transitory.
As a child I had no father and when I started shaving my mother told me to shave on my cheeks upwards so as not to pull the skin down. Hardly I think something a man would be particular about and one of the several feminine ideas my mother gave me with which I am cool about, but it makes me realise that difference is actually taught in the cradle. That we transmit a simple idea and before we know it it grows with the generations until it become ‘part of the culture’. In my mother’s case if we grew to live in a world where all men shaved upwards on their cheeks it would be because in the past history a child had no father due to divorce. It would have no other meaning.
Looking at the world and its presumptions I begin to divine the simple things behind ideas and manners we hold sacred. Lost is history like the idea of god, these things become the child and the adult and take a shape of their own in our imaginations far beyond their worth.
Memes are biologically probably necessary for communities to bond, but they are intellectual mistakes.