The study of cultural evolution has quite a long history. A remarkable advancement was achieved in 1976, when the book The selfish gene by Richard Dawkins was published. Its value was twofold: the book was written bij an evolutionary biologist, and in the book the term meme was proposed for the unit of cultural evolution, comparable to genes in living nature. According to Dawkins, a meme should comply to three prerequisites: there should be variation within a meme, some process of replication should be acting, and different memes should have different levels of fitness. If this set of requirements is present, evolution will automatically happen.

Several critics arose in the years after. Critics point to the scarcity of empirical research, and to the weak definition of the meme concept. Memes can be part of other, larger memes. In this respect the comparability with genes is disrupted.

If the requirement of variation within a meme is necessary for evolution, a concept parallel to that of alleles should be proposed for memes. Furthermore, the principles and methods for the reconstruction of evolution as applied in cladistics could be helpful. One basic principle in cladistic research is the recognition of primitive (plesiomorph) and advanced (apomorph) characters states, which can be applied to the wind mill diversity. Considering the situation that wind mill characters can be classified in primitive and advanced character states, these states could be indicated by the terms plesiomemes and apomemes.

A first attempt to define plesiomemes and apomemes resulted in a list of eleven characters (approximate year or period of appearance in brackets):

• From a fixed to a gearing body (post mill; 1180)
• Development of a turning cap on a fixed body (tower mill; 1295)
• From a gable cap to a dome (conical cap; 14th C)
• Decreasing size of the mill body and enlargement of the standard (wip mill; 1430)
• Tilted instead of horizontal windshaft (14th C ?)
• Development of a conical body (tower and smock mills; 16th C)
• Varying angle of weather of the lattice (16th C)
• Development of a tail for outside gearing (1573)
• From a conical cap to a boat-shaped cap (early 17th C ?)
• Attaching wind boards at front side of wing (common sails; 17th C)
• Replacement of lattice by jib sails in Aegean Sea area (jib sails; 19th C)

The application of tree building software resulted in a first evolutionary tree of major wind mill types:

Several comments can be made with respect to this tree. Several memes occur more than once in the tree (white bars). A further problem is the reversed chronologic order of some memes in the branch with post and wip mills. This is due to the sitution that the variable weather of the lattice was introduced to already existing mills. As a result, this meme shifts back in the topology of the tree (and virtually in the chronology too). In this particular case of windmill evolution, the chronology is known and this can be used to verify the tree. In this way the validity of the tree can be tested.