The Book, The Selfish Gene, is a fantastic Read and I highly reccommend it

It was Interesting that Dawkins seems to have coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene”(which, in itself, is pretty cool). But I found this snippit from one of the World’s most vocal Atheist truly inspirational and I thought I’d pass it on to you:

“If you contribute to the world’s culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G. C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong.”

“We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism- something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”

Richard Dawkins – The Selfish Gene