A few years ago Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, came up with the idea of the "meme". He was trying to make the slippery problem of the evolution of human culture as tractable as that of biological evolution, and he thought that if cultural information could somehow be divided into separately transmissible elements, in the way that biologically heritable information is divided into genes, the rest might follow. A successful meme, he speculated, might pass from person to person like a virus. Few recent memes have been more successful than the one which causes many people, particularly in Britain, to believe that the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine can cause autism in children. That meme has been responsible for a fall in vaccination rates in Britain from more than 90% to less than 80% over the past six years (see chart on next page). The consequence has been a rise in the incidence of measles and mumps, as the so-called "herd immunity" which mass vaccination brings has broken down. As the meme has spread, so have the viruses.
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