The essence of my theory is that culture, like nature, is the product of evolved information. Every other aspect of the way in which I explain human culture flows from the wellspring of that statement. Many readers will know that in the past (Distin 2005) I have made use of a handy conceptual tool that Richard Dawkins (1976) has given cultural theorists and referred to units of cultural information as memes. I am aware, however, that this terminology can so distract those readers who are in the habit of dismissing memetics out of hand, that they are unable to hear what else I am saying. Although a burgeoning optimism about cultural evolution is detectable across a variety of disciplines, memetics has been widely criticised and perhaps even more widely misapplied to a variety of irrelevant subjects. The World Wide Web in particular is full of pages and blogs that use the term meme with varying degrees of vagueness, often not bothering to define it at all but simply stretching it to fit whichever space has opened up in the writer's vocabulary. The intellectual credibility of memetics is diminished every time a meme-related term is hijacked in this way and its sense redirected to the latest cultural phenomenon to have caught the eye. This is one reason why memetic language can provoke a hostile reaction, and I would urge its critics not to be misled by the manifold ways in which it has been misused, to think that memetics itself is as vacuous as so many of its applications have been.