CONCEPT
Meme (Dawkins's Concept)
A unit of cultural replication — tune, idea, fashion, technique — that spreads brain-to-brain through imitation, subject to the same Darwinian dynamics as genes.
Coined by Richard Dawkins in the final chapter of The Selfish Gene (1976), the meme is to culture what the gene is to biology: a replicator that copies itself, varies through transmission errors and creative modification, and survives differentially based on its fitness in the environment of human attention. Memes — from melodies to religions to engineering practices — propagate not through genetic inheritance but through learning, imitation, and communication. Dawkins noted that cultural evolution operates at speeds vastly exceeding biological evolution because memetic transmission occurs at the speed of conversation rather than the speed of reproduction. The concept has been widely adopted and widely misunderstood; the internet meme (viral image) trivializes the underlying framework, which was always about information dynamics, not entertainment.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Dawkins introduced the meme as a thought experiment: if replicators are defined by their capacity to copy themselves with variation under selection, are genes the only replicators? The answer was no. A melody heard and hummed passes from brain