Dawkins Coins 'Meme'

1976

Date: 1976 · Place: The Selfish Gene, chapter 11, Oxford University Press · Figures: Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, 35 · Tags: Theory, The Word 01. A Replicator That Isn't Genetic Richard Dawkins ends The Selfish Gene with a chapter ('Memes: the new replicators') proposing that ideas, tunes, and cultural patterns replicate from brain to brain by imitation, mutate, and compete for attention the way genes compete for survival. He needs a one-syllable noun. He shortens the Greek mimeme to meme by analogy with gene. His examples are quiet: God as a successful meme, the tune of a hymn, the practice of celibacy among priests as a meme that survives despite carrying its own non-reproductive payload. He is not thinking about cartoon frogs. 02. Patient Word The term sits dormant in academic memetics for two decades. Daniel Dennett picks it up in Consciousness Explained (1991). Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (1999) tries to build a discipline around it. None of this is what survives. What survives is the word as the internet uses it: an image (with or without caption) that spreads, mutates, and gets used as social vocabulary. Dawkins's framing is correct in shape and wrong in tone. He coins a word for tunes; we use it for cats with grammar errors. The replicator does not know its own future use. "We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." — Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976), chapter 11 Sources • Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976) • Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (1999) • Dawkins's 2013 interview reflecting on 'internet meme'