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    s tances and churning out copies of themselves until the last 35,000

    years.

    Dawkins calls these new replicators memes.

    Genes, says Dawkins, swam through the protoplasmic soup of

    the early earth, nourishing themselves on organic sludge.  Memes float

    through another kind of sea--a sea of human brains.  Memes are ideas,

    the snatches of nothingness that leap from mind to mind.  A melody

    wells up in the reveries of a solitary songwriter.  It seizes the brain of a

    singer. Then it infects the consciousness of millions.  That melody is a

    meme.  A scientific concept starts as a vague glimmer in one

    researcher's thoughts.  It ends up with whole schools of adherents.

    That concept is a meme.  Each flips from the puddle of one brain to

    another, crazily copying itself in the new environment.  But the memes

    that count the most are the ones that assemble vast arrays of resources

    in startling new forms.  They are the memes that construct social

    superorganisms.

    Genes sit at the center of each cellular blob, dictating the

    construction of a multi-billion-celled body like you and me.  As genes

    are to the organism, so memes are to the superorganism, pulling

    together millions of individuals into a collective creature of awesome

    size.

    Memes stretch their tendrils through the fabric of each human

    brain, driving us to coagulate in the cooperative masses of family, tribe

    and nation.  And memes--working together in theories, worldviews or

    cultures--can make a superorganism very hungry.

    From 1852 to 1864, Karl Marx sat alone nearly every day in a

    corner of the library of the British Museum, going through books and

    assembling his theories.2  Little did he realize it, but the bearded writer

    was simply the tool of fragmentary memes.  Those ideas had been

    floating in the zeitgeist, waiting for a receptive human mind to come

    along and function as an enzyme functions in human

    metabolism--splicing together molecules destined for each other.  Marx

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