Meme

A unit of cultural information that spreads between people through imitation. Memes include ideas, behaviors, styles, and expressions that can be copied and altered.

Imitation: Learning or reproducing an action by observing another person. Imitation is the basic process by which memes pass between people.
The Selfish Gene: Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book presenting gene-centered views of evolution and introducing the term “meme.” The book first set out the meme as a cultural replicator.
Cultural evolution: Change in socially learned information, practices, and institutions across time. Memes are one proposed unit for describing cultural evolution.
Gene: A unit of hereditary information encoded in DNA or RNA and passed between organisms. The meme analogy borrows the gene’s role as a replicating unit, despite major differences.
Cultural transmission: The transfer of learned information, practices, and beliefs within or between generations. Memes are units carried by the broader process of cultural transmission.
Memetics: The proposed study of memes as replicating units of cultural information. Memetics developed the idea into a framework for studying cultural change.
Diffusion of innovations: The process by which a new idea or practice spreads through a social system over time. This framework tracks adoption patterns that memetic accounts also seek to explain.
Cultural replicator: A proposed entity or pattern that is copied and transmitted within a culture. This broader idea captures cultural copying without committing to every claim of memetics.
Memeplex: A cluster of mutually supporting memes that tend to spread together. Related memes can reinforce one another and travel as a package.
Susan Blackmore: A writer and psychologist known for developing memetic accounts of imitation and cultural evolution. Blackmore gave imitation a central role in the theory of memes.

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