No, you chose to substitite poem lines, without even citing them, for giraffe necks, to conceal the fact that word memes point to non-meme things.

LOL! Why would I do that? Symbols can point to things. That says nothing about the utility or even existence of a meme.

The words ‘giraffe neck’ represent actual giraffe necks. But the unrevealed lines of a hypothetical poem cannot be said to point to anything in particular, which is why you substituted.

LOL! OK, you pick any four lines of poetry you like, with the first two lines being well known. Then address my question. It doesn’t matter to me, that’s why I asked the question so generally.

We also know that religions (polytheism - henotheism - monotheism or nontheism), and political systems (monarchy - theocracy - ideological totalitarianism - democracy), and languages, all evolve (Latin is the main root of many European languages, but they have borrowed terms from other tongues).

Yes: cultures change. Cultural institutions change. Cultures are transmitted. Thanks Dawkins, I didn’t know that before. LOL! I liked this one too:

Sal2: You damned well know what the word ‘eclipsed’ meant in context; it meant that a shitload more people would recognize the first four notes of beethoven’s 5th Symphony than would recognize a passage pulled from the middle. Stop indulging in gratuitous asininity. As to how many memes are in Beethoven’s 5th symphony, we would have to check individual minds for that. The count would be different for different individuals, because they would have cognitively absorbed the symphony to different degrees. The fact that some people own more shoes than other doesn’t mean that shoes don’t exist.

LOL! Yeah, you couldn’t say “More people recognise the first four notes of the symphony than the rest. maybe its because some things are more memorable than others!” No, it had to be dressed up in meme talk, all about ecli[psing and stuff, because you STILL haven’t addressed the central problem: a meme is putatively a unit, but given that its an entirely subjective unit, how can you say it is a unit at all? You are trying to reduce experience to neurobiology, and the one is fundamentally not the other.

LOL! But keep going, true beleiver!