What Is Memetics?

Memetics is the study of how ideas, behaviors, and cultural information spread from person to person, the way genes carry biological information from one generation to the next.

Richard Dawkins coined the word meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. He used it for units of cultural transmission: ideas, melodies, fashions, catchphrases, anything that gets copied from one person to another.

Just like genes, memes can be replicated, modified, and selected. Some ideas spread far and last for generations, others vanish fast. Survival may come down to how memorable, useful, emotionally compelling, or easy to repeat an idea is.

Internet memes are the familiar case. Memetics covers a lot more: religious beliefs, political ideologies, social customs, cultural norms, even philosophical assumptions. All of it can be examined as cultural transmission.

The draw for me is that you can study an idea by how it spreads, why it persists, and what it does to human behavior and social structures, in addition to what it means.

Questions I want to chase:

• Do ideas just get transmitted, or do they shape the people who carry them?
• Can cultural evolution explain why harmful social beliefs persist?
• Where does memetics meet sociology, philosophy, and Christian theology?

The one I care about most is how beliefs about human nature get built into the institutions and systems that shape society.

Further Reading

• Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976), especially Chapter 11, “Memes: The New Replicators.”
• Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (1999).
• Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995).