Keith Henson

Founder, L5 Society

Keith Henson is the author of "Memes, Meta-Memes and Politics," "Memetics: The Science of Information Viruses," published in Whole Earth Review #57, "The Guru Trap, or What Computer Viruses Can Tell Us About Saddam Hussein", printed in Computer Underground Digest," "Cryonics, Religions and Memetics," a 1993 article co-authored with Arel Lucas, and "Memes, Evolution and Creationism," from the Journal of Ideas, also co-authored with Arel Lucas. He founded the L5 Society in August of 1975 with his then-wife Carolyn Meinel.

In Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, Ed Regis cites Keith Henson as a contributor to the study of memetics, how ideas are propagated analogously to viral replication and the replication of code in computer programming. In his days as a student at the University of Arizona, when asked to submit his religious affiliation along with his registration materials, Henson put down "Druid." Word spread around campus, students began following suit, and at one point a full 20% of the students at the university were registered Druids, including Reform Druids, Orthodox Druids, Zen Druids, and Latter-Day Druids. Henson is attributed in Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene for coining the neologism "memeoids" for someone whose concern for propagating a given meme outweighs the importance of their own continued survival.