Parapsychology seems to be growing further away from the progress and excitement of the rest of consciousness studies.

Finally, we might decide that civilisation itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population - weighing the value of scientists and musicians against that of politicians, for example...

Just as the design of our bodies can be understood only in terms of natural selection, so the design of our minds can be understood only in terms of memetic selection.

For the planet's sake, I hope we have bird flu or some other thing that will reduce the population, because otherwise we're doomed.

Certainly almost everything we do and think is colored in some way by memes, but it is important to realize that not everything we experience is a meme. If I walk down the street and see a tree, the basic perception that's going on is not memetic.

If everyone understood evolution, then the tyranny of religious memes would be weakened, and we little humans might find a better way to live in this pointless universe.

Memetics provides a new approach to the evolution of language in which we apply Darwinian thinking to two replicators, not one. On this theory, memetic selection, as well as genetic selection, does the work of creating language.