Learn · Lesson 1 of 5 · ~3 min

The Word Is Born (1976)

Before it meant a funny picture, it meant a bold idea about how culture evolves.

In 1976 a young Oxford biologist named Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene. Most of the book is about genes: tiny instructions that get copied, generation after generation, and how the ones that copy best end up everywhere.

Then, in the final chapter, he turned the idea around. What if genes aren’t the only things that copy themselves? People pass on something else too: songs, sayings, recipes, fashions, ways of building things. None of it lives in DNA. All of it gets copied.

He needed a name for that kind of copyable idea. He started from the Greek mimeme, “something imitated,” and cut it down to a single syllable that sounds like gene: meme.

His examples were deliberately ordinary: tunes, catch-phrases, clothing fashions, ways of making pots and building arches. The point was that culture changes by copying, and copying has rules.

That’s the whole story behind the word. Decades later, the internet borrowed it for images and jokes that spread online. That isn’t a different idea. It’s the original idea, running faster.

A meme is any idea that spreads by being copied from one mind to another.