Comment by eigenblake

I think I see how you're thinking about it, to see how I see it, consider the following: Memes don't have to be inherited from genetic biological parents. Memes can have their own memetic parents. Like the joke "I feel like I'm the average of my 5 best friends" - our habits, quirks, idiosyncracies, all fit into the framework. It just needs some reproductive medium (human brains). That's why evolutionary biologists would be interested in studying this and things like it. There are epigenetic traits that exist and aren't genes and might be able to self reproduce. To keep the analogy going, consider that things that are catchy are easier to have this "memetic reproduction" so a catchy song might get sung a lot, serving as its fitness condition. So it's a generalization of biological genes to not just dna and rna and physical molecules but any substrate that can carry information. It's familiar to how we call it a 'viral' video.