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Folklorists have had a notoriously difficult time devising a definition of the word "folklore." In this essay, I will argue that the concept of the meme can help us understand both what folklore is and why it has been difficult to define.
In his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, zoologist Richard Dawkins argues that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection can be most productively understood from the gene's point of view. The selfish gene wants' to make sure it is passed on to future generations; if it helps the organism in which it resides survive and reproduce at a greater rate than the organisms with which it competes, the gene wins. (The organism wins, too, but from the gene's selfish and narrow point of view that's a secondary consideration.) Organisms are just vehicles for transmitting genes.
This stance, controversial twenty years ago, is widely accepted today.2 In order to apply the insights gained from the theory of natural selection to culture, Dawkins proposed the word "meme" to "convey the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation" (Dawkins 1989 [1976]:192, emphasis in original). Memes, like genes, are replicators; and like genes, some memes survive and others die out. Some examples of highly successful memes are alphabets, cooking, wearing clothes, marriage, and (like it or not) war. Successful memes like these, once grasped, are obviously useful5 and thus prone to rapid replication. The idea of using fire almost certainly spread quickly once one or more early humans happened upon it. Obviously, folklore consists of memes, and the concept "folklore" is also a meme - ballads and folktales are memes, as are the concepts "ballad" and "folktale."4
By the time you have read this far, I expect that the specter of cultural evolution has reared its ugly head. "Meme" could be used to defend the idea of unilinear cultural evolution, but I am emphatically not interested in doing so. In fact, the better we understand biological evolution, the more likely we are to realize that E. B. Tylor's vision of cultural evolution is extremely unlikely. All organisms are not evolving toward some single, specifiable superior form (say, human beings), so why should we suppose all cultures are evolving toward some single, specifiable...