The question that arises next is: what are the qualities required for a meme to survive? Or what are the survival qualities that a meme or an idea needs to survive and replicate itself? The three qualities as listed by Dawkins for a meme to survive are the following:

 

The first point is that memes should be able to live long enough, i.e., they should be there long enough for people to imitate them, for the meme itself to be transmitted to other people. Memes that are there for a very short while will definitely not survive because these will not have time to be replicated.

The second is fecundity, in the sense of fertility. A meme should have fecundity in order to be amenable to reproduction in the cultural sense.

The third is copying-fidelity. A meme in the process of transmission – at least in its essence – cannot change too much. An example stated by Dawkins is Darwin's theory of evolution. When person A teaches Darwin's theory of evolution, she will teach it in a certain way, or she will have other things to say along with the theory, and person B will do so in a different way. But the point here is that Darwin's theory in essence would not change. If Darwin's theory would have changed in essence over these years, then the theory per se would have died out. So we may conclude that Darwin's theory of evolution as a meme has had enormous copying-fidelity.