… just another blahg …

As part of a recent poll, Relevant magazine - which caters to young evangelicals in America - asked the following.

Barack Obama 18.4%
Dennis Kucinich 2.1%
Mike Gravel 0.5%
John Edwards 24.9%
Joe Biden 0.9%
Hillary Clinton 2.6%
Mike Huckabee 16.6%
Rudy Giuliani 4.1%
Fred Thompson 4.8%
Ron Paul 5.4%
Mitt Romney 13.2%
John McCain 6.6%

Who would be voted Most Likely to Be a Preacher?

Barack Obama 19.8%
Dennis Kucinich 0.8%
Mike Gravel 1.3%
John Edwards 7.5%
Joe Biden 1.0%
Hillary Clinton 0.9%
Mike Huckabee 37.3%
Rudy Giuliani 1.2%
Fred Thompson 6.5%
Ron Paul 4.8%
Mitt Romney 12.9%
John McCain 5.8%

Who would Jesus vote for?

Folks in evolutionary studies have this idea of memes. If I understand it right, a meme is the fundamental unit of cultural evolution - like the gene is to biological evolution. Richard Dawkins coined the term in 1976, and it seems to have become quite the thang, in academia and out. According to Dawkins, some memes - like genes - will propagate less successfully and become extinct, while others will survive, spread, and mutate.

I see memes as ideas that evolve in to trends - the iPod revolution, for example. It’s like a cultural contagion for better or worse - an idea that leaps from mind to mind. Santosh Desai, a brilliant commentator on popular culture, explains: “A meme is something that is imitative, almost in a reflexive way rather than a cognitive way. Like a tune which gets into your head and refuses to leave. It is possible to infect other people with it. It bypasses the intellect.” Think catchy. Viral marketing and religion are other examples of memes cited by Desai.

Sort of a side note: Dawkins contends that memes can at times be even more powerful than genes and gives the example of celibacy. There’s more on the spread of ideational infections - whether bad or good - in this TED talk by the remarkable Dan Dennett.

Don’t know how long the Google Trends Lab has been around, but it’s lots and lots of fun.