Cultural Evolution and Memetics

• Culture: the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that, for a certain group, define their general way of life and that they have taken over from others.
• Cultural evolution: the development of culture over time, as conceptualized through the mechanisms of variation and natural selection of cultural elements
• Replicator: an information pattern that is able to make copies of itself, typically with the help of another system. Examples are genes, memes, and (computer) viruses.
• Meme: a cultural replicator; a unit of imitation or communication.
• Memeplex (or meme complex): a collection of mutually supporting memes, which tend to replicate together
• Memetics: the theoretical and empirical science that studies the replication, spread and evolution of memes
• Fitness: the overall success rate of a replicator, as determined by its degree of adaptation to its environment, and the three requirements of longevity, fecundity and copying- fidelity.
• Longevity: the duration that an individual replicator survives.
• Fecundity: the speed of reproduction of a replicator, as measured by the number of copies made per time unit
• Copying-fidelity: the degree to which a replicator is accurately reproduced.
• Vertical transmission: transmission of traits (memes or genes) from parents to offspring 
• Horizontal transmission: transmission of traits between individuals of the same generation
• Memotype: a meme in the form of information held in an individual’s memory. Mediotype: a meme as expressed in an external medium, such as a text, an artefact, a song, or a behavior.
• Sociotype: the group or community of individuals who hold a particular meme in their memory.