【正文】 s office during office hours? Student That wouldn?t seem right. You know, taking time from other students who need help? Counselor Don?t say that. That?s what office hours are for. There is no reason you couldn?t pop in to say hi and to make yourself known. If you are learning a lot in class, let the professor know. Wouldn?t you appreciate positive feedback if you were a professor? Student You are right. That?s a good idea. Counselor OK, er…let?s turn to your social life. How?s it going in the dorms? Student I don?t have much in mon with my roommate or anyone else I?ve met so far. Everyone?s into sports and I?m more artsy, you know, into music. I play the cello. Counselor Hah, have you been playing long? Student Since age ten. It?s a big part of my life. At home I was the youngest member of our munity orchestra. Counselor You are not going to believe this. There is a string quartet on campus, all students. And it so happened that the cellist graduated last year. They?ve been searching high and low for a replacement, someone with experience. Would you be interested in auditioning? Student Absolutely. I wanted to get my academic work settled before pursuing my music here. But I think this would be a good thing for me. I guess if I really want to fit in here I should find people who love music as much as I do. Thank you. Counselor My pleasure. Lecture 1 Sociology Narrator Listen to part of a lecture in a sociology class. Professor: Have you ever heard the one about alligators living in New York sewers? The story goes like this: a family went on vacation in Florida and bought a couple of baby alligators as presents for their children, then returned from vacation to New York, bringing the alligators home with them as pets. But the alligators would escape and find their way into the New York sewer system where they started reproducing, grew to huge sizes and now strike fear into sewer workers. Have you heard this story? Well, it isn?t true and it never happened. But despite that, the story has been around since the 1930s. Or how about the song ?twinkle, twinkle little star?, you know, ?twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are?. Well we?ve all heard this song. Where am I going with this? Well, both the song and the story are examples of memes. And that?s what we would talk about, the theory of memes. A meme is defined as a piece of information copied from person to person. By this definition, most of what you know, ideas, skills, stories, songs are memes. All the words you know, all the scientific theories you?ve learned, the rules your parents taught you to observe, all are memes that have been passed on from person to person. So what? You may say. Passing on ideas from one person to another is nothing new. Well, the whole point of defining this familiar process as transmission of memes is so that we can explore its analogy with the transmission of genes. As you know, all living anisms pass on biological information through the genes. What?s a gene? A gene is a piece of biological information that gets copied or replicated, and the copy or replica is passed on to the new generation. So genes are defined as replicators. Genes are replicators that pass on information about properties and characteristics of anisms. By analogy, memes also get replicated and in the process pass on culture information from person to person, generation to generation. So memes are also replicators. To be a successful replicator, there are three key characteristics: longevity, fecundity and fidelity. Let?s take a closer look. First, longevity. A replicator must exist long enough to be able to get copied, and transfer its information. Clearly, the longer a replicator survives, the better its chances of getting its message copied and passed on. So longevity is a key characteristic of a replicator. If you take the alligator story, it can exist for a long time in individual memory, let?s say, my memory. I can tell you the story now or ten years from now, the same with the twinkle, twinkle song. So these memes have longevity because they are memorable for one reason or another. Next, fecundity. Fecundity is the ability to reproduce in large numbers. For example, the mon housefly reproduces by laying several thousand eggs, so each fly gene gets copied thousands of times. Memes, well, they can be reproduced in large numbers as well. How many times have you sung the ?twinkle, twinkle song? to someone? Each time you replicated that song, and maybe passed it along to someone who did not know it yet, a small child maybe. And finally, fidelity. Fidelity means accuracy of the copying process. We know fidelity is an essential principle of geic transmission. If a copy of a gene is a bit different from the original, that?s called a geic mutation. And mutations are us