The written word was a technology advancement as well. It let stories be retold/copied with more precision than song and dance. One could argue that simply fo

The written word was a technology advancement as well. It let stories be retold/copied with more precision than song and dance. One could argue that simply formalizing language in writing stifled human creativity as well. However, its not just memetic evolution that dictates creativity, its also mental abstraction. Even if you copied the same memes to the head of every human, the ideas of the individuals would soon diverge as our mind mixes and matched these 'terminal' memes to propose brand new memes. I think that the greatest risk to human creativity is much the opposite of widespread propagation. The greatest risk is that the new memes with the most utility can not be understood by enough people to be propagated widely enough, fast enough. The greatest risk is ending up with the mediocrity of new memes that propagate only because they are simple enough to be quickly understood.