Modern means information-based!

If it's not based on information, it's not modern.

Steve Lohr in The New York Times---here.:
"In a modern economy, information should be the prime asset — the raw material of new products and services, smarter decisions, competitive advantage for companies, and greater growth and productivity."  

Gleick: "Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment." The place to find this quote in an article for The Smithsonian is here.

The Selfish Gene is a book on evolution by Richard Dawkins, published in 1976.  The Selfish Gene is described in Wikipedia as based on a "gene-centered" view of evolution. This notion helped Gleick with the meme idea as a central, organizing principle.

Have you tried The Lucifer Principle, by Howard Bloom here?   Howard was the one who introduced me to the idea of the meme.

Roger Sperry had the notion that ideas are “just as real” as the neurons they inhabit. Gleick quotes him: Ideas have power, Sperry said:
Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet.

In Gleick's Smithsonian article, he wrote: "most of the elements of culture change and blur too easily to qualify as stable replicators." So I guess what we measure things against are "stable replicators."  That's what I'm looking for every day---a stable replicator.