Essay on Thought Contagion. Explains Thought Contagion and examples of how MEMES effect the mind. Teacher of class was very impressed.

Essay by CHeSTeRWoOBaSHigh School, 12th gradeA+, May 2002

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Evolution Is No Longer Dependent Upon Random Mutation and Natural Selection: It Is We As Human Beings Who Will Determine The Survival and Future Evolution of All Forms of Life On Earth.

Thought Contagion: 1. A self-spreading thought, idea, attitude, belief, or other brain-stored item of learned culture. 2. The process of ideas self-propagating in a population. 3. (Technical usage) A memory item, or portion of an individual's neurally stored information, whose causation depended critically upon prior instantiation of the same memory item in one or more other individuals. 4. (Technical usage) The process of repeated causation of new instantiations of memory items in which the causation of those new instantiations depended critically upon the prior instantiation of the same memory item in one or more other organisms' nervous systems.

Everyone is familiar with genes: the biological code-carriers that program our corporal body by amino acid sequences in our DNA.

Genes are the element of heredity that forms the base for the pattern of all life. But did you know that there is a parallel force inhabiting the human mind; that there is a living force in the realm of ideas, so abstract and deeply ingrained its existence has remained invisible to us until just recently?

Just as genes travel from cell to cell generationally as they replicate, and fulminate physical changes, memes travel from mind to mind like viruses, infecting us with their concepts. Memes are changed by the mind, on the basis of an individual's vMEME*, thus evolving, and move from the carrier mind once again, infecting others. This is the thought contagion, the evolutionary epidemiology of ideas. This is the root of all of our thinking.

Thought contagions are beliefs or ideas that "program" for their own spreading. Evolving like life forms, through evolution by...