Richard Dawkins gave us a powerful lens to look at life through The Selfish Gene. Genes, he argued, are not altruistic. They do not care about the organism, the species, or the planet. They only care about replication. Survival is a side effect. Meaning is optional.

Years later, the idea of the meme emerged as the cultural equivalent of the gene even though it was he who had coined the term. A unit of information that wants to replicate. A tune. A phrase. A belief. A joke. An outrage. Memes do not want to be true. They want to spread.

This distinction matters more today than ever before.

Humans evolved as slow information processors. We relied on friction. Stories traveled through mouths, across generations, shaped by context, memory, and empathy. There was latency. There was cost. Information had to be worth carrying. A rumor had to walk barefoot across villages, pausing for sleep, food, contradiction, death. By the time it arrived it was sun-bleached, rain-washed, sometimes sterilized entirely. Now ideas travel at light-speed, immune to fatigue or fact-checking. They vault from amygdala to amygdala before the prefrontal cortex can lace its shoes.

Social media removed that friction.

Today, ideas jump directly from one nervous system to another without passing through understanding. The faster a piece of information moves, the less time it spends being questioned. And memes have learned this well. A good meme does not ask for reflection. It asks for a reaction.

Anger spreads faster than nuance. Fear spreads faster than facts. Certainty spreads faster than doubt. The selfish meme optimizes for engagement, not truth. For velocity, not value.

And here lies the problem.

Human societies are information systems. Trust, cooperation, culture, and progress all depend on the quality of information flowing through them. When the system is polluted, behavior follows. Bad inputs create bad outputs. This is not moral failure. This is systems failure.

Social media platforms are not neutral pipes. They are evolutionary environments. Memes that spread are rewarded with reach. Memes that slow people down are punished with invisibility. Over time, this selects for the most aggressive, addictive, identity affirming ideas.

Just like genes, memes do not care if the host suffers.

A meme that polarizes a society but gains engagement will win. A meme that simplifies reality into teams and enemies will win. A meme that hijacks dopamine will win. Whether humans flourish or fracture is irrelevant to the meme.

We like to believe we are users of social media. In reality, we are hosts.

This is why the conversation around free speech often misses the point. The issue is not expression. The issue is amplification. Never in history has a species allowed its most primitive emotional triggers to be amplified at planetary scale in real time. Our brains are ancient. The network is not.

When outrage becomes a currency, calm becomes a liability. When attention becomes scarce, extremity becomes strategy. And when identity becomes content, disagreement becomes violence.

None of this is accidental. It is emergent behavior from a system that rewards replication above all else.

The selfish meme has found the perfect environment.

The tragedy is that humans are capable of much better information hygiene. We are capable of slow thought. Of silence. Of restraint. Of context. Of attention. Of patience. Of wisdom passed deliberately, not virally.

But these traits do not trend.

If genes shaped our bodies, memes are shaping our minds. The difference is that genetic evolution takes millennia. Memetic evolution takes weeks. Societies do not have the immune system to adapt at this speed.

This is not a call to delete social media. It is a call to recognize it for what it is. An environment where not all ideas deserve equal oxygen. Where virality is not virtue. Where sharing is an ethical act, not a reflex.

In biology, unchecked replication leads to cancer.

In culture, it leads to something eerily similar.

The question is not whether memes will spread. They always will.

The question is whether we can choose which ones we let live inside us.