From Darwin to Meme: How a Catchphrase Catches On

Just Do It.

Doesn’t matter if you own the sneakers or personally subscribe to the runners’ school of aspiration. Nike’s cattle prod leaps from one brain to another brain to your brain with the ease of every other earworm, welcome or not, in history. That’s how memes have always worked, since long before the Internet.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins gave it a name: “When you plant a fertile meme in my mind (a tune, idea, catchphrase, or fashion) you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking--the meme for, say, ‘belief in life after death’ is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.”

Read more at Fast Company.