Take male strategies for success in the world. If you've got all the advantages, if you're attractive and clever and all of that, you will generally go for very high quality females.

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...

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That's not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator.

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.

Take male strategies for success in the world. If you've got all the advantages, if you're attractive and clever and all of that, you will generally go for very high quality females.

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.

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.