The meme is Earth’s second replicator, evolving, as the gene does, via replication, variation, and selection.

The idea that we should eat 2,000 calories a day dates to 1993 and has proven a remarkably successful meme.

The 2k meme has spread via cultural niche construction and human behaviour, identity, and cognitive bias.

This post is Part 3 of a series. Part 1 can be found here, and Part 2 can be found here.

Ideas and habits spread amongst humans for many reasons, many of which have little to do with whether they are good for us or not. In this series, we’re looking at how numerical the Western world has made eating and exercise. A touch of cultural evolution theory may help us think about how and why this trend might have spread other than “because it’s a good thing.”

Everyone knows about one of the replicators this planet is home to: the gene. A simple “evolutionary algorithm” acts on genetic material via the mind-bending power of its three-step process: replication, variation, and selection. The brilliance of Darwin’s realization was that when these three steps occur, design must arise—with no need for a designer. Philosopher Dan Dennett (1995) called this “the single best idea anyone ever had.”

Not so many people know about the second replicator alive and kicking on this planet: the meme. It’s funny how the idea of internet memes took the technical term and kept the idea of information spreading like a virus but lost the link to how the spreading happens: via the evolutionary algorithm. The term was coined at the end of Richard Dawkins’ (1976) The Selfish Gene to designate a unit of cultural transmission subject to the same evolutionary process as the gene:

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, and ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain, via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.

Memetics is the study of this second replicator. In the realm of ideas and........

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