Memetics

Memetics studies how cultural ideas and behaviors spread, replicate, and change by analogy with biological evolution. It treats memes as units of cultural transmission subject to variation and selection.

Meme: A unit of cultural information that can spread between people through imitation or communication. The meme is memetics’ proposed cultural counterpart to a gene.
Imitation: The reproduction of another person’s action or behavior through observation. Imitation is a direct mechanism for copying many behaviors treated as memes.
Richard Dawkins: A British evolutionary biologist who introduced the term “meme” in The Selfish Gene. His gene analogy supplied the foundational language for memetics.
Cultural epidemiology: The study of how cultural representations spread and persist through populations, often using cognitive and social mechanisms. It explains cultural spread without requiring discrete, gene-like meme units.
Cultural evolution: The change in culturally transmitted information across generations through social learning and other forms of transmission. Memetics is one approach to explaining cultural evolution.
Replication: The production of copies of an informational pattern or structure. Memes must be copied, with or without exact fidelity, to spread.
The Selfish Gene: Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book presenting gene-centered accounts of evolution and introducing the meme concept. Its final chapter proposed memes as cultural replicators.
Dual inheritance theory: A framework that models the coevolution of genetic and cultural inheritance using population-level methods. It offers formal models of cultural evolution that do not depend on memetics’ replicator analogy.
Gene: A sequence of DNA that contributes to heredity and can be copied during biological reproduction. Genes provide the model for replication that memetics applies to cultural information.
Mutation: A change in copied information that creates a variant of an existing pattern. Cultural copying can alter memes, creating variants that spread differently.

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