Cultural software

Richard Dawkins has coined the word meme rhymes with cream to describe these units of cultural transmission. Meme derives from the Greek mimesis, or imitation, and may also be considered to be a pun on the English memory and the French meme. Memes are the building blocks of the cultural software that forms our apparatus of understanding. Memes are spread from person to person by ob­servation and social learning either face to face or through media of com­munication like writing, television, or the Internet.
Through observation and social learning, people internalize and assimilate skills, beliefs, attitudes, and values, and these become part of their cultural software. In this way, memes are communicated from mind to mind, are adapted into our cultural software, and become a part of us. Culture is a system of inheritance we inherit our cultural software from the people around us, and we pass it on to those whom we in turn communicate with.
We use memes to understand, yet memes also use us, because they are inside us. Our tools of understanding are constructed from and with the skills and abilities that memes collectively provide. A person is a human being in­habited by memes, a complicated symbiosis of organism and cultural skills. People are complex combinations of their biological inheritance and cultural software, mediated through environmental influences; the information they carry is a combination of their genes and memes.
There are as many different kinds of memes as there are things that can be transmitted culturally. They include skills, norms, ideas, beliefs, attitudes, values, and other forms of information. Examples of memes or groups of memes include how to perform a particular dance step how to build a flying buttress a tune a political slogan how to order a meal in a restaurant and belief in a divinity. Memes are primarily skills and abilities, but they also include beliefs about the world, paradigms of research, expectations about appropriate conduct including the conduct of others, lyrics to songs, and ways of pro­nouncing particular words. Memes encompass all the forms of cultural know­ how that can be passed to others through the various forms of imitation and communication.Linguistic abilities are primary examples of memes, but so, too, are bodily or kinesthetic skills, for bodily movements are as important to culture as belief systems. Body language and dance athletic, artistic, and craft skills gestures, expressions, and other bodily movements-all are to some extent transmissible and hence can constitute memes or complexes of memes. Indeed, imitating and improvising bodily movements may be one of the most basic forms of cultural transmission.