The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. "Mimeme" comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosylable 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 "memor," or to the French word "mŽme" (which means "same"). 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 gene types propogate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propogate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via 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 propogate 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 propogation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell."
For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time. Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subversient to the old. The old gene-selected evolution, by making brains, provided the "soup" in which the first memes arose. Once self-copying memes had arisen, their own, much faster, kind of evolution took off. We biologists have assimilated the idea of genetic evolution so deeply that we tend to forget that it is only one of the many possible kinds of evoluton.
Some memes, like genes, achieve brillinant short term success in spreading rapidly, but do not last in the meme pool. Popular songs and stilletto heels are examples. Others such as the Jewish religious laws, may continue to propogate themselves for thousands of years, usually because of the great potential permanence of written records.
At first sight is looks as if memes are not high fidelity replicators at all. Every time scientist hears an idea and passes it on to somebody else, he is likely to change it somewhat. I have made no secret of my debt in this book to the ides of Robert L. Trivers. Yet I have not repeated them in his own words. I have twisted them round for my purposes, changing the emphasis, blending them with ideas of my own and of other people. The memes are being passed on to you in altered form. This looks quit unlike the particulate, all-or-none quality of gene transmission. It look as though the meme transmision is subject to continous mutation, and also to blending.
When we say that all biologist nowadays believe in Darwin's theory, we do not mean that every biologist has, graven in his brain, an identical copy of the exact worlds of Charles Darwin himself. Each individual has his own way of interpreting Darwin's ideas. He probably learned them not from Darwin's own writings, but from more recent authors. Much of what Darwin said is, in detail, wrong. Darwin if he read this book would scarcely recognize his own theory in it, though I hope he would like the way I put it. Yet, in spite of all this, there is something, some essence of Darwinism, which is present in the head of every individual who understands the theory. The meme of Darwin's theory is therefore the essential basis of the idea which is held in common by all brains who understand the theory.
- From Selfish Genes by Richard Dawkins.