Information is useful to humans only in the form of memes or else it is hard to use and hard to teach. It is just how the human brain works. Moral principles and guides, especially if they are at all complicated, must be encapsulated as memes for them to be useful.
Memes are another name for ideas and is a great way to describe them. Moralities are made of ideas, so memes are used here to describe the parts and whole of morality. Memes are still not a well developed concept and memetics is an infant study. We do not yet know their underlying nature or how the human brain is adapted to them. We know something descriptive of how they propagate and spread. We have started to theorize how they adapt and evolve. Some of the possible rules seem a bit wild when compared to the rules governing biological life and genetics. Still, it seems quite apparent that memes are fantastically important to human survival and while memetics is still only initially defined, it is a very popular topic, because anyone researching humans has a fair familiarity with them. Anytime you examine humans, you bump into the the effects of memes right away. To study humans is to realize the importance of what humans know and believe. A common debate has been about the importance of nature verses nurture in creating what a human is. Overall it is a silly polarized argument, that like most polarized arguments, has truth in both positions. It seems likely that that discussion will eventually become about nature verses memes and the answer that a human is shaped by both. As such, any description of memes will have to include both a psychological and functional description of the meme as well as a recognition of the related genetic basis. Much of the description of human evolution relates to the development of the characteristic technologies of different groups as humans developed. When trying to describe what humans will need to survive in the future, much of the discussion is about development of technologies. (Of course, that is partly because it is easier to describe than some of the non-mechanical things that humans will require.) To study how humans think is to notice that human thought seems to naturally group. That is the nature of any idea or concept. Ideas are composed of different parts. A human learns some or all of the parts of a concept and the idea seems to all come together into a single concept. I used to call this concept a mindset, which wasn't a bad idea, but it misses many parts of the meme description. Parallel to this is History of Consciousness, a fairly new field of study that describes what humans know, when they learned it and what it's importance (to survival) is. It might one day be called the History of Memes. Unfortunately, memes leave little in the way of solid fossils behind. In any case, for a lot of reasons, all of the ideas, concepts, techniques, truths, lies and everything else that makes up moralities, are all described here as memes. Doing so allows for a description of the parts that were added together to make any morality. Hopefully, it will also allow these parts to be examined separately for their importance. Here is a list of memes that are worth considering to understand something about memes and morality... 1. It hurts less when I wear something around my waist to protect my crotch from bushes and branches when I am walking. This meme may not seem so important, but it is simple and so is a good example to illustrate what an illumination this must have been whenever bi-pedal humans figured it out. 2. David Brin wrote an excellent discussion of memes that described basic national characters. Right or wrong, it becomes a very illuminating memetic hypothesis. He said that national characters fall into 5 kinds. These are Paranoia, Conformity, Feudalism, Machismo and Otherness. He was most interested in Otherness, a society that looks outward for ideas as opposed to just following their own history, but his description of the national memes seemed more useful to this discussion. A little thought can show that there is a great deal of truth in what he said. 3. The meme that there is more to life than just what we can see and measure. 4. Memes of Loyalty, Honesty, ...