Crashfrog, please - I am becoming rather unhappy with this discussion. I believe that the ultimate goal of good dialogue is to reach consenus - not to persuade the other party.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to pick on you. And your english is excellent, I would not have known that you weren't a native speaker.
Like I said, I'm not trying to pick on you. It's just that this isn't the first time I've encountered the idea of memes, and it's become apparent to me over the years that there's just not much value to the theory. So my questions to you aren't for the purpose of putting you on the spot, but rather, to see if I'm wrong about the theory, to see if it's considerably better-developed than I think.
So if some "animal" decides not to "obey" this principle, it is at least interesting.
Well, maybe. Not all animals get "programmed" correctly. Some individuals have behaviors that run counter to their survival, and so they don't survive. On the other hand, sometimes it happens that behaviors that appear to confer a survival disadvantage on the individual do persist in the population. This
is interesting, and a model of "kin selection" or "selfish genes" has been advanced to help explain how behaviors that lead to the individual's death can actually
increase the number of that individual's genes that survive. Someody mentioned "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins, that's the book to pick up. It explains in more detail what we're talking about, here. (Dawkins also has a book on memes that you might already be familiar with...)