Memes as Discrete Units

Though Dawkins defined the meme as “a unit of cultural transmission,
or a unit of imitation”, memeticists vary in their definitions of meme.
The lack of a consistent, rigorous and precise understanding of what
typically makes up one unit of cultural transmission remains a problem
in debates about memetics.

Although memeticists speak of memes as discrete units, this need not
imply that thoughts somehow become quantized or that “atomic” ideas
exist which one cannot break down into smaller pieces. The meme as a
unit simply provides a convenient way of discussing “a piece of thought
copied from person to person”, regardless of whether that thought
contains others inside it, or forms part of a larger meme. A meme could
consist of a single word, or a meme could consist of the entire speech
in which that word was first uttered. The “word itself” meme will most
likely survive many more generations (after transmission alone or in
other sentences) than the “speech in its entirety” meme will survive
(due to errors of memory, abridged versions, etc.)

This forms an analogy to the idea of a gene as a self-replicating
set of code. The gene in this definition does not consist of a set
number of nucleotides, but simply a collection of nucleotides (possibly
in many different locations on the DNA) that replicate together and
code for some set of behaviors or body parts.

In 1981 biologists Charles J. Lumsden and Edward Osborne Wilson
published a theory of gene/culture co-evolution in the book Genes,
Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process. They argued that the
fundamental biological units of culture must correspond to neuronal
networks that function as nodes of semantic memory. Wilson later
adopted the term meme as the best existing name for the fundamental
unit of cultural inheritance and elaborated upon the fundamental role
of memes in unifying the natural and social sciences in his book
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.