Facebook memes can evolve like genes
ANN ARBOR — What started as a politically liberal Facebook meme in support of health care reform morphed as it spread across the social network into hundreds of thousands of variations—some just a few words from the original, but others centered on taxes, beer, or Star Wars’ villain Jabba the Hutt.
The twists on the original text over time in many ways mirrored the evolution of biological genes, researchers from the University of Michigan and Facebook have found. (more…)