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In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, British scientist Richard Dawkins defended his newly coined word meme, which he defined as "a unit of cultural transmission." Having first considered, then rejected, mimeme, he wrote: "Mimeme comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like gene." (The suitable Greek root was mim-, meaning "mime" or "mimic." The English suffix -eme indicates a distinctive unit of language structure, as in grapheme, lexeme, and phoneme.) Like any good meme, meme caught on and evolved, eventually developing the meaning known to anyone who spends time online, where it's most often used to refer to any one of those silly captioned photos that the Internet can't seem to get enough of.

A meme (/mim/ MEEM)[1][2][3] is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of comedic imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.[4] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.[5] In popular language, a meme may refer to an Internet meme, typically an image, that is remixed, copied, and circulated in a shared cultural experience online.[6][7]

Proponents theorize that memes are a viral phenomenon that may evolve by natural selection in a manner analogous to that of biological evolution.[8] Memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance, each of which influences a meme's reproductive success. Memes spread through the behavior that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread, and (for better or for worse) mutate. Memes that replicate most effectively enjoy more success, and some may replicate effectively even when they prove to be detrimental to the welfare of their hosts.[9]

A field of study called memetics[10] arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model. Criticism from a variety of fronts has challenged the notion that academic study can examine memes empirically. However, developments in neuroimaging may make empirical study possible.[11] Some commentators in the social sciences question the idea that one can meaningfully categorize culture in terms of discrete units, and are especially critical of the biological nature of the theory's underpinnings.[12] Others have argued that this use of the term is the result of a misunderstanding of the original proposal.[13]

The word meme itself is a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins, originating from his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.[14] Dawkins's own position is somewhat ambiguous. He welcomed N. K. Humphrey's suggestion that "memes should be considered as living structures, not just metaphorically",[14] and proposed to regard memes as "physically residing in the brain".[15] Although Dawkins said his original intentions had been simpler, he approved Humphrey's opinion and he endorsed Susan Blackmore's 1999 project to give a scientific theory of memes, complete with predictions and empirical support.[16]

The word was coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976) as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.[14][20] Examples of memes given in Dawkins' book include melodies, catchphrases, fashion, and the technology of building arches.[21]

Although Richard Dawkins invented the term meme and developed meme theory, he has not claimed that the idea was entirely novel,[23] and there have been other expressions for similar ideas in the past.[24]

In 1904, Richard Semon published Die Mneme (which appeared in English in 1924 as The Mneme). The term mneme was also used in Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the White Ant (1926), with some parallels to Dawkins's concept.[24] Kenneth Pike had, in 1954, coined the related terms emic and etic, generalizing the linguistic units of phoneme, morpheme, grapheme, lexeme, and tagmeme (as set out by Leonard Bloomfield), distinguishing insider and outside views of communicative behavior.[26]

Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator. He hypothesized that one could view many cultural entities as replicators, and pointed to melodies, fashions and learned skills as examples. Memes generally replicate through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient copiers of information and behavior. Because humans do not always copy memes perfectly, and because they may refine, combine or otherwise modify them with other memes to create new memes, they can change over time. Dawkins likened the process by which memes survive and change through the evolution of culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution.[21]

But if you contribute to the world's culture, if you have a good idea...it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G.C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong.[8]

In that context, Dawkins defined the meme as a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation and replication, but later definitions would vary. The lack of a consistent, rigorous, and precise understanding of what typically makes up one unit of cultural transmission remains a problem in debates about memetics.[31] In contrast, the concept of genetics gained concrete evidence with the discovery of the biological functions of DNA. Meme transmission requires a physical medium, such as photons, sound waves, touch, taste, or smell because memes can be transmitted only through the senses.

Initially, Dawkins did not seriously give context to the material of memetics. He considered a meme to be an idea, and thus a mental concept. However, from Dawkins' initial conception, it is how a medium might function in relation to the meme which has garnered the most attention. For example, David Hull suggested that while memes might exist as Dawkins conceives of them, he finds it important to suggest that instead of determining them as idea "replicators" (i.e. mind-determinant influences) one might notice that the medium itself has an influence in the meme's evolutionary outcomes.[32] Thus, he refers to the medium as an "interactor" to avoid this determinism. Alternatively, Daniel Dennett suggests that the medium and the idea are not distinct in that memes only exist because of their medium.[33] Dennett argued this in order to remain consistent with his denial of qualia and the notion of materially deterministic evolution which was consistent with Dawkins' account. A particularly more divergent theory is that of Limor Shifman, a communication and media scholar of "Internet Memetics". She argues that any memetic argument which claims the distinction between the meme and the meme-vehicle (i.e. the meme's medium) are empirically observable is mistaken from the offset.[34] Shifman claims to be following a similar theoretical direction as Susan Blackmore, however her attention to the media surrounding Internet culture has enabled Internet Memetic research to depart in empirical interests from previous memetic goals.[35] Regardless of Internet Memetic's divergence in theoretical interests, it plays a significant role in theorizing and empirically investigating the connection between cultural ideologies, behaviors, and their mediation processes.

Memes, analogously to genes, vary in their aptitude to replicate; successful memes remain and spread, whereas unfit ones stall and are forgotten. Thus, memes that prove more effective at replicating and surviving are selected in the meme pool.[citation needed]

Memes first need retention. The longer a meme stays in its hosts, the higher its chances of propagation are. When a host uses a meme, the meme's life is extended.[36] The reuse of the neural space hosting a certain meme's copy to host different memes is the greatest threat to that meme's copy.[37] A meme that increases the longevity of its hosts will generally survive longer. On the contrary, a meme that shortens the longevity of its hosts will tend to disappear faster. However, as hosts are mortal, retention is not sufficient to perpetuate a meme in the long term; memes also need transmission.

Memes reproduce by copying from a nervous system to another one, either by communication or imitation. Imitation often involves the copying of an observed behavior of another individual. Communication may be direct or indirect, where memes transmit from one individual to another through a copy recorded in an inanimate source, such as a book or a musical score. Adam McNamara has suggested that memes can be thereby classified as either internal or external memes (i-memes or e-memes).[11]

Some commentators have likened the transmission of memes to the spread of contagions.[38] Social contagions such as fads, hysteria, copycat crime, and copycat suicide exemplify memes seen as the contagious imitation of ideas. Observers distinguish the contagious imitation of memes from instinctively contagious phenomena such as yawning and laughing, which they consider innate (rather than socially learned) behaviors.[39] e24fc04721