A small curiosity about how one elegant idea — the meme — seems to stop just short of the place it fits best.

Richard Dawkins’ idea of memes has always appealed to me. It’s a wonderfully tidy way of describing how ideas behave a bit like living things — spreading, mutating, adapting, and occasionally going feral. As a framework, it explains a great deal about how cultures shift and why certain notions take hold while others quietly fade away.

But there’s one small puzzle I’ve never quite resolved. Dawkins applies the meme concept to almost everything: fashion, politics, social habits, superstitions, advertising jingles — you name it. Ideas evolve everywhere… except, apparently, in religion.

When it comes to religion, Dawkins suddenly treats beliefs as fixed, literal, and uniform, as if they were carved in granite rather than shaped by centuries of cultural cross‑pollination. It’s an odd exception, given that religious ideas have changed more dramatically — and more visibly — than almost any others.

I’m not offering an answer. I just find it curious that the one domain where memetic evolution is most obvious is the one place the meme lens is set aside.