"Bad art", Alain de Botton suggests in the Art of Travel, "could be defined as a series of bad choices as to what to show and what to leave out."

And therefore never send to know for whom the fat lady ululates; she ululates for thee.

The concept of memes is either really deep or really, really obvious. You can probably guess what side I initially came down on. But having studied the matter, I'm now obliged to say that I'm not so sure.
The term "meme" (rhymes with "dream") was coined by zoologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book about evolution, The Selfish Gene. Dawkins doesn't claim genes are selfish in the same way as, say, kids who won't share. Rather, he explains, the genes carried by each individual are the driving force behind evolution. As sentient beings we consider ourselves masters of our own fates, but in reality we're just the battlebots in which competing genes slug it out--determining, through the impersonal workings of natural selection, which will survive.
Dawkins proposes that the meme is to culture what the gene is to biology. A meme is a reproducible idea and as such is the basic unit of cultural transmission. In his words: "Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation."
A meme isn't just any fleeting impression or random thought. One defining characteristic of a meme is that it reproduces itself with a fair degree of fidelity. A joke is a meme; so is the alphabet. One can argue that language is the ultimate meme (or "memeplex," as some call it). The sum of all memes is culture, transmitted from generation to generation, just as the genome is.
Meme theory proponents argue that, just as we're the pawns by which our genes compete for dominance, so are we the creatures of our memes. You've heard such expressions as "The concept took on a life of its own" or "Never underestimate the power of an idea whose time has come," right? To memeticists, these aren't mere conceits but rather reflections of the true state of affairs.
You're saying: Get out. I'm the boss of my ideas; they aren't the boss of me.
Don't be so sure. Few doubt that genes are real, and I venture to say the notion of the selfish gene is now the accepted scientific view. But genes are really coded bits of information more than they are tangible things, and though they happen to be embodied in the physical substrate of DNA, their essence can also be conveyed symbolically. Memes are much the same, and their substrates can be as varied as a book or someone's memory. Granted, some memes (a chain letter, an urban legend) are trivial or short-lived. But think about the memeplex of organized religion, instances of which have endured for millennia and to which many devote their lives.
Memes arguably have shaped our biology. Some think the human brain has evolved a built-in faculty for language acquisition. Memeticists say language offered an advantage to our early ancestors because it can transmit memes: for instance, how to make a stone ax. Memes thus tipped the evolutionary balance in favor of individuals with language skills. Through this mechanism they may even be responsible for our big brains.
What do memes add to the conventional understanding of the propagation of culture? Just this: They remove the element of conscious choice, making the process purely mechanical. Just as natural selection accounts for mankind's origins without invoking God, meme theory accounts for our cultural edifices without positing a "self" or a "soul." That solves a long-standing philosophical conundrum: If we accept the idea of an unbreakable chain of cause and effect at the molecular level and take the materialist view that our brains are just complicated arrangements of molecules, there doesn't seem to be any room for free will. Susan Blackmore, in The Meme Machine (1999), argues that with memes there doesn't need to be. Free will and the sense of self are illusions. I'm not an independent actor, just an assemblage of memes (a "selfplex"). Things happen not because "I" make choices but because of interaction between the memes of which this "I" is composed. One objects: So how did you write your book, lady? Blackmore's response: Creative types don't create; they're merely vehicles by which evolving memes manifest themselves. ("The book wrote itself.") Sounds like the woolliest college bull session ever, I know, but even if you don't buy it you've still got to think: Whoa.
--CECIL ADAMS

How long is a piece of string theory?

Paul Davies of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University asks...

The big question: how long is a piece of string theory? The world about us looks so bewilderingly complex, it seems impossible that humans could ever understand it completely. But dig deeper, and the richness and variety of nature are found to stem from just a handful of underlying mathematical principles. So rapid has been the advance of science in elucidating this hidden subtext of nature that many scientists, especially theoretical physicists, believe we are on the verge of formulating a "theory of everything".
When Stephen Hawking accepted the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University in 1980 he chose as the title of his inaugural lecture: "Is the end in sight for theoretical physics?" What he meant was that physicists could glimpse the outlines of a final theory, in which all the laws of nature would be melded into a single, elegant mathematical scheme, perhaps so simple and compact it could be emblazoned on your T-shirt. Now Hawking has done something of a U-turn by claiming in a lecture at Cambridge last month that we will never be able to grasp in totality how the universe is put together.
The quest for a final theory began 2500 years ago. The Greek philosophers Leucippus and Democritus suggested that however complicated the world might seem to human eyes, it was fundamentally simple. If only we could look on a small enough scale of size, we would see that everything is made up of just a handful of basic building blocks, which the Greeks called atoms. It was then a matter of identifying these elementary particles, and classifying them, for all to be explained.
Today we know atoms are not the elementary particles the Greek philosophers supposed, but composite bodies with bits inside. However, this hasn't scuppered the essential idea that a bottom level of structure exists on a small enough scale. Physicists have been busy peering into the innards of atoms to expose what they hope is the definitive set of truly primitive entities from which everything in the universe is built. The best guess is that the ultimate building blocks of matter are not particles at all, but little loops of vibrating string about 20 powers of 10 smaller than an atomic nucleus.
String theory has been enormously beguiling, and occupies the attention of physicists and mathematicians. It promises to describe correctly not only the inventory of familiar particles but the forces that act between them, like electromagnetism and gravity. It could even explain the existence of space and time, too.
Though string theorists are upbeat about achieving the much sought-after theory of everything, others remain sceptical about the entire enterprise. A bone of contention has always surrounded the word "everything". Understanding the basic building blocks of physical reality wouldn't help explain how life originated, or why people fall in love. Only if these things are dismissed as insignificant embellishments on the basic scheme would the physicist's version of a final theory amount to a true theory of everything.
Then there is a deeper question of whether a finite mind can ever fully grasp all of reality. By common consent, the most secure branch of human knowledge is mathematics. It rests on rational foundations, and its results flow seamlessly from sequences of precise definitions and logical deductions. Who could doubt that 1+1=2, for example? But in the 1930s the Austrian philosopher Kurt Godel stunned mathematicians by proving beyond doubt that the grand and elaborate edifice of mathematics was built on sand. It turns out that mathematical systems rich enough to contain arithmetic are shot through with logical contradictions. Any given mathematical statement (eg, 11 is a prime number) must either be true or false, right?
Wrong! Godel showed that however elaborate mathematics becomes, there will always exist some statements (not the above ones though) that can never be proved true or false. They are fundamentally undecidable. Hence mathematics will always be incomplete and in a sense uncertain.
Because physical theories are cast in the language of mathematics, they are subject to the limitations of Godel's theorem. Many physicists have remarked that this will preclude a truly complete theory of everything. Now it seems Hawking has joined their ranks.
So does this mean physicists should give up string theory and other attempts at unifying the laws of nature, if their efforts are doomed to failure? Certainly not, for the same reason that we don't give up teaching and researching mathematics because of Godel's theorem. What these logical conundrums tell us is there are limits to what can be known using the rational method of inquiry. It means that however heroic our efforts may be at understanding the world about us, there will remain some element of mystery at the end of the universe.
Paul Davies is professor of natural philosophy at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University.