Meme Theory

Meme a cultural unit an idea or value or pattern of behavior that is passed from one person to another by non genetic means as by imitation.

Meme theory. The term meme was coined in richard dawkins 1976 book the selfish gene but dawkins later distanced himself from the resulti. Meme theory suggests that ideas behaviours or skills are transferred between people through the process of imitation. In sociology and linguistics it was frame semantics that explored the conceptual structure of social settings and thought processes. Memetics is the study of information and culture based on an analogy with darwinian evolution.

Consider the invention of fire and the wheel as fundamental technologies that. Around the time that meme theory was capturing the public imagination there were several researchers giving name to recognizable patterns of human thought and behavior that emerge over and over again. Memetics describes how an idea can propagate successfully but doesn t necessarily imply a concept is factual. Critics contend the theory is untested unsupported or incorrect.

Mankind s greatest inventions are all the result of individual flashes of inspiration or are they. Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer.