The term "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" (1976) to describe an idea, behavior, style, or practice that spreads from person to person within a culture. Just as genes are the basic units of biological heredity, Dawkins proposed that memes are the basic units of cultural transmission or imitation.
Examples of memes include:
Memes share three key characteristics with genes that allow them to evolve through a process analogous to natural selection:
This simulation demonstrates how different types of memes can spread through a population, evolve through mutation, and compete for survival in different cultural environments.
Cultural evolution is the change in cultural elements—such as ideas, beliefs, technologies, and customs—over time. While biological evolution operates through genetic inheritance, cultural evolution occurs through social learning and transmission processes like teaching, imitation, and other forms of social communication.
Key parallels between cultural and genetic evolution include:
However, cultural evolution differs from genetic evolution in several ways:
This simulator demonstrates how memes (cultural units) spread through a population, how they can mutate and evolve, and how different cultural environments can favor different types of memes.
Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of memes in the final chapter of "The Selfish Gene," titled "Memes: The New Replicators." This chapter represented a significant intellectual leap, extending the concept of selfish replicators from the biological realm to the cultural one.
Dawkins wrote:
"I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind."
The key insight was that ideas, behaviors, and cultural elements could be viewed as replicators—entities that make copies of themselves—just like genes. Dawkins suggested that memes, like genes, are subject to variation, heredity, and selection, and therefore undergo a form of evolution.
According to this view, memes that are good at getting copied—whether because they are useful, emotionally resonant, easily remembered, or otherwise appealing—will spread, while those that aren't will fade away. This provides a framework for understanding cultural change through an evolutionary lens.
Dawkins emphasized that memes, like genes, are "selfish" in the sense that selection acts primarily at the level of the replicator. A successful meme is one that spreads widely, regardless of whether it benefits its hosts (though many successful memes do benefit their hosts). This explains why harmful ideas can sometimes spread widely—they need only to be good at replication, not good for us.
The idea of memes has since developed into the field of memetics and influenced studies of cultural evolution, though the extent to which cultural transmission truly resembles genetic transmission remains debated among scholars.