Richard Dawkins

=== "Meme" as behavioural concept ===
{{Main|Meme}}
[[File:Richard Dawkins Cooper Union Shankbone.jpg|thumb|right|Dawkins at [[Cooper Union]] in [[New York City]] to discuss his book ''[[The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution]]'' in 2010]]

In his book ''The Selfish Gene'', Dawkins [[neologism|coined]] the word ''meme'' (the behavioural equivalent of a gene) as a way to encourage readers to think about how Darwinian principles might be extended beyond the realm of genes.{{sfn|Dawkins|1989|p=11}} It was intended as an extension of his "replicators" argument, but it took on a life of its own in the hands of other authors, such as [[Daniel Dennett]] and [[Susan Blackmore]]. These popularisations then led to the emergence of [[memetics]], a field from which Dawkins has distanced himself.<ref name="misunderstanding">{{cite journal |last1=Burman |first1=J. T. |year=2012 |title=The misunderstanding of memes: Biography of an unscientific object, 1976–1999 |journal=[[Perspectives on Science]] |volume=20 |issue=1 |pages=75–104 |doi=10.1162/POSC_a_00057|s2cid=57569644 |doi-access=free }}{{open access}}</ref>

Dawkins's ''meme'' refers to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator of a certain idea or set of ideas. He hypothesised that people could view many cultural entities as capable of such replication, generally through communication and contact with humans, who have evolved as efficient (although not perfect) copiers of information and behaviour. Because memes are not always copied perfectly, they might become refined, combined, or otherwise modified with other ideas; this results in new memes, which may themselves prove more or less efficient replicators than their predecessors, thus providing a framework for a hypothesis of [[cultural evolution]] based on memes, a notion that is analogous to the theory of biological evolution based on genes.<ref>{{cite book |last=Kelly |first=Kevin |title=Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World |year=1994 |publisher=Addison-Wesley |location=United States |isbn=978-0-201-48340-6 |page=[https://archive.org/details/outofcontrolnewb00kell/page/360 360]| title-link = Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World}}</ref>

Although Dawkins invented the term ''meme'', he has not said that the idea was entirely novel,<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/formerly-hyper-weird/memetics.html |title=Memes |work=Center for the Study of Complex Systems |publisher=University of Michigan |access-date=14 August 2009 |last=Shalizi |first=Cosma Rohilla |archive-date=22 April 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090422091304/http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/formerly-hyper-weird/memetics.html |url-status=live }}</ref> and there have been other expressions for similar ideas in the past. For instance, John Laurent has suggested that the term may have derived from the work of the little-known German biologist [[Richard Semon]].<ref name="mneme">{{Cite journal |last=Laurent |first=John |year=1999 |title=A Note on the Origin of 'Memes'/'Mnemes' |journal=Journal of Memetics |volume=3 |issue=1 |pages=14–19 |url=http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1999/vol3/laurent_j.html |access-date=17 March 2008 |archive-date=25 March 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180325202014/http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1999/vol3/laurent_j.html |url-status=live }}</ref> Semon regarded "mneme" as the collective set of neural memory traces (conscious or subconscious) that were inherited, although such view would be considered as [[Lamarckian]] by modern biologists.<ref name="leiden">{{Cite web |last=van Driem |first=George |year=2007 |title=Symbiosism, Symbiomism and the Leiden definition of the meme |url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249904767 |access-date=6 November 2018 |archive-date=21 November 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201121060835/https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249904767_Symbiosism_Symbiomism_and_the_Leiden_definition_of_the_meme |url-status=live }}</ref> Laurent also found the use of the term ''mneme'' in [[Maurice Maeterlinck]]'s ''The Life of the White Ant'' (1926), and Maeterlinck himself stated that he obtained the phrase from Semon's work.<ref name=mneme/> In his own work, Maeterlinck tried to explain memory in termites and ants by stating that neural memory traces were added "upon the individual mneme".<ref name="leiden"/> Nonetheless, [[James Gleick]] describes Dawkins's concept of the meme as "his most famous memorable invention, far more influential than his [[The Selfish Gene|selfish gene]]s or his later proselytising against religiosity".<ref>{{cite book |first=James |last=Gleick |title=The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood |year= 2011 |publisher=Pantheon |isbn=978-0-375-42372-7 |page=269}}</ref>