 The most serious and most respected efforts to apply evolutionary thinking to culture begin from a different starting point to memetics (although see Shennan 2008, 2011 for significant work that takes the meme’s-eye view). Meme theorists tend to begin with a general characterisation of evolution by natural selection, namely as a process that requires differential competition between replicators. Hence the meme theorist looks for some strict analogue to the gene in the cultural realm, which can play the replicator role. Dawkins implies that it is only because humans are subject to colonisation by replicators other than genes that human evolution escapes the tyranny of the gene. On this view, memes are required in order to free our species from a form of biological determinism.