The term meme was coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In this book Dawkins defined a meme as: “A noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission… Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain.”
As he further wrote: “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 propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.”
