"Experience is a process that continually gives us new material to digest. We handle this intellectually by the mass of beliefs of which we find ourselves already possessed, assimilating, rejecting, or rearranging in different degrees. Some of the apperceiving ideas are recent acquisitions of our own, but most of them are common-sense traditions of the race. There is probably not a common-sense tradition, of all those which we now live by, that was not in the first instance a genuine discovery, an inductive generalization like those more recent ones of the atom, of inertia, of energy, of reflex action, or of fitness to survive. The notions of one Time and of one Space as single continuous receptacles; the distinction between thoughts and things, matter and mind between permanent subjects and changing attributes; the conception of classes with sub classes within them; the separation of fortuitous from regularly caused connections; surely all these were once definite conquests made at historic dates by our ancestors in their attempt to get the chaos of their crude individual experiences into a more shareable and manageable shape. They proved of such sovereign use as denkmittel that they are now a part of the very structure of our mind. We cannot play fast and loose with them. No experience can upset them. On the contrary, they apperceive every experience and assign it to its place." (James 1904, Humanism and Truth)
And now let's replace 'gene' by 'meme' in the next quote:
"The gene pool is the long-term environment of the gene. 'Good' genes are
blindly selected as those that survive in the gene pool. This is not a
theory; it is not even an observed fact: it is a tautology. The interesting
question is what makes a gene good. As a first approximation I said that
what makes a gene good is the ability to build efficient survival
machines-bodies. We must now amend that statement. The gene pool
will become an evolutionarily stable set of genes, defined as a gene pool
that cannot be invaded by any new gene. Most new genes that arise,
either by mutation or reassortment or immigration, are quickly penalized
by natural selection: the evolutionarily stable set is restored.
Occasionally a new gene does succeed in invading the set: it succeeds in
spreading through the gene pool. There is a transitional period of
instability, terminating in a new evolutionarily stable set-a little bit of
evolution has occurred. By analogy with the aggression strategies, a
population might have more than one alternative stable point, and it
might occasionally flip from one to another. Progressive evolution may be
not so much a steady upward climb as a series of discrete steps from
stable plateau to stable plateau. It may look as though the population as
a whole is behaving like a single self-regulating unit. But this illusion is
produced by selection going on at the level of the single gene. Genes are
selected on 'merit'. But merit is judged on the basis of performance
against the background of the evolutionarily stable set which is the
current gene pool." (Dawkins 1976, The Selfish Gene, p. 86)
