What is a meme?
[...]
We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of
a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of
imitation. "Mimeme" comes from a suitable Greek root, but I
want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like "gene." I hope my classicist
friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it
is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related
to "memory," or to the French word même. It should be
pronounced to rhyme with "cream." Examples of memes are tunes, ideas,
catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building
arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from
body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme
pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad
sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a
good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it
in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said
to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague
N. K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter:
". . . memes should be regarded as living structures, not just
metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind,
you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's
propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic
mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking-the meme
for, say, 'belief in life after death' is actually realized physically,
millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual
men the world over."
[...]
(Excerpt from The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, Oxford University Press, 1976, as quoted in the anthology The mind's I by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, Basic Books, 1981.)
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