By definition, a meme is memetic. It "self-replicates" from one person's mind to another's in an anologous way to how genes propagate.

A meme that fails to attain some sort of popularity doesn't meet the criteria. Like a gene that fails to propagate itself. An evolutionary dead-end.

Wasn't a gene that failed to propagate itself still a gene?

Shit. Yeah, I guess it is. Let me try again, rephrasing the grandparent comment:

> Not every picture with text is a meme. To become a meme it requires a certain level of distribution.

becomes

"Not every sequence of amino acids is a gene. To become a gene it requires a certain level of self-replication."

Okay, so that's still a bit shaky, but I what I'm trying to get at is that a "meme" is something that includes its popularity in the definition. It's impossible for me to make a meme that only I see. That's just a photo or whatever.

Jokes, music, and insults can be inside jokes, or a Wu-Tang album, or a dig I only share with one other person. A meme is any of those things that's also popular in the viral sense. It encapsulates a maybe-complexish idea in a simple image.

If I asked you for a meme that demonstrates "wanting what I don't have, even though I have more than enough" you might give me that classic ::guy-looking-over-his-shoulder-at-pretty-girl-walking-by-while-his-girlfriend-gives-him-dagger-eyes:: one.

viruses have DNA/RNA genes but they do not self-replicate. They need our cell machinery.

I think you could say that about our own genes as well. They don't physically pull the levers and whatnot to make their own copies. They rely on external cell machinery to pull the strands apart and start transcription and so on.

A gene "self-replicates" in an "emergent property" kind of way, in that it encodes the information necessary for its own future proliferation. A viral strand of DNA/RNA does the same thing, encoding the behaviors and structure of the virus such that it'll proliferate.

You know, like a spicy meme :)