“the meme machine.” Cultural reproduction is based on imitation, unlike narrow reproduction, which is based on self-replication. This notion is not only correct, but imitation is more important than Aigen's hypercirculation, and it is more definitive than Eric Jantsch's autocatalysis. Imitation is a kind of replication, and replication is the main way for a complex system to maintain non-equilibrium.

The meme theory is a generalized evolutionary theory, the general evolution is a worldview, the worldview is the basis of meta-ethics, meta-ethics is the basis of episte- mology, and epistemology is the basis of ontology. But neither Blackmore nor her teacher, Richard Dawkins, saw the fundamental position of meme theory on philosophy.

The biggest flaw in the meme theory is that it does not recognize the essence of the meme. Blackmore's definition of meme is “instructions for carrying out behaviour, stored in brains (or other objects) and passed on by imitation.”^[8] This definition is wrong. The meme is not just a behavioral order, but also a variety of ideas and emotional expressions. Dawkins said, “memes presumably exist in brains, and we have even less chance of seeing one.”^[9] They explicitly refused to regard the meme as word and symbol. Dawkins said, “I would not wish to call them digital.”^[10] This rejection is not justified.

There are countless skilled craftsmen, famous doctors, celebrity chefs, famous generals, heroes, and breeding experts in ancient times. However, most of them only worked without recording their behavior and thoughts in words, so they completely disappeared after death. The civilization they created cannot have any impact on later generations and cannot be accumulated in the total achievements of human civilization. Dawkins and Blackmore clearly realize that memes are copied with insufficient high fidelity to be compared with gene.^[11] However, they did not realize that the biggest difference between simple imitation and imitation by symbol is fidelity. And this distinction is not a little differe