Dawkins's concept of memes provides an interesting way to look at the nature of humanity, society, and civilizations. It's a simple concept, too: something graspable by any reasonably observant person. It's perhaps a little sad that something which represents naught but a shadow of the original idea has overtaken it in such a popular forum.

Is it possible that the meme of Dawkins's "meme" could itself die out, killed off by a parasitic invasive species that claimed its very name? Without that name, how do we talk about them?

Or, is the spread of the name 'meme' to mean 'image macros' instead indicative of the power of Dawkins's original idea? Here we are, looking at a community of a million teenagers, most of them utterly uninterested in thinking about the spread of ideas, taking a name from science and applying it to their own culture. The kids aren't even using the word incorrectly: image macros are a meme; individual examples are memes themselves, competing, reproducing, thriving, dying.

Fun to think about.