MONICA the meme. This phenomenal news event, and the enormous amount of electronic ink spent covering it did produce an interesting data set. M. Best [Best, 2000] has used it to provide some of the first empirical testing of interesting hypotheses concerning cultural change often attributed to Richard Dawkins [Dawkins, 1976]; just as biological evolution sifts through the gene pool to find fit individuals, cultural evolution sifts through available memes (paradigms, theories, hypotheses, ideas, words, and so on) to find the most fit. But theories of biological evolution are notoriously subtle, and the data concerning them are much better! Although it is only a beginning, Best’s statistical analysis of phenomena like the rise and fall of the token MONICA within newspapers and UseNet newsgroups provides some of the first concrete data on some very interesting questions.