Memes have been proposed to explain wide swathes of human culture and language use. I argue that what is really doing the explanatory work in many of these cases is a basic mechanism of information transmission, which is distinct from memetic evolution by natural selection in significant ways. Perhaps the most significant of these is that information transmission depends primarily on the interests of the users of information, rather than the reproductive interests of the informational entities—‘memes’—themselves. Although my main target is memetic approaches, this argument also applies to some other, nonmemetic, theories of cultural evolution.

中文翻译：

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挤出模因解释

模因已被提出来解释广泛的人类文化和语言使用。我认为，在许多这些案例中，真正起到解释作用的是一种基本的信息传递机制，这在很大程度上不同于自然选择的模因进化。或许其中最重要的是，信息传输主要取决于信息用户的利益，而不是信息实体——“模因”——本身的再生产利益。虽然我的主要目标是模因方法，但这个论点也适用于其他一些非模因的文化进化理论。