Since Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species in 1859 his ideas have themselves evolved into forms that Darwin and his early proponents could scarcely have foreseen. Herbert Spencer took Darwin's concept of selection in nature and projected it into human society. Spencer's coinage "the survival of the fittest" embodies the "natural law" by which he maintained human society should be governed. Ideas of a competitive social order are still prevalent today, and we see progress as Spencer envisioned it, a sort of directed evolution. Not only do we witness competition among individuals and enterprises, but states and nations, too, struggle for the upper hand.
Recently Darwin's theory of evolution has also been applied in other contexts. One particularly interesting application has been to cultural ideas, concepts that are naturally imitated like fashions, tunes, or truisms passed from generation to generation. Zoologist Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene, suggests that evolution occurs not only in biological systems based on replicating molecules, but also in "unit(s) of cultural transmission," which he calls "memes" (deliberately echoing the sound of "genes"). Memes, like genes, can evolve into new forms, as might a joke told many times, or they can become extinct when supplanted by other more successful ideas. Dawkins' example of a popular meme is the concept of God. This kind of meme gets passed down through the generations by means of written or spoken language, and, aside from having religious value to individuals, it serves to knit society together more closely than might be possible without a common faith. Nearly every culture is characterized by a distinctive God meme, or, to be more precise, a meme concerning supernatural agency in the creation and operation of the physical universe (Dawkins, 1989; pp. 192-193).
Like all other species, human beings must accommodate themselves to environmental contingencies in order to survive. Part of our adaptive strategy has been the development of culture, a means of transmitting useful information and behaviors from one generation to the next, and from one group to another, without hardwiring them into the biological system in the form of instinct. Unlike innate behavior, culturally influenced knowledge and conduct can be modified to meet the challenge of changing circumstances, although such modification is a slow and arduous process. For most of our species' tenure, this strategy of cultural adaptation has proven highly successful.
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