
Sifting Truth From Hearsay
The Poetry of Reality with Richard Dawkins
00:00
The Evolution of the Meme
The idea of a meme at Richard coined that term in 1976 and it laid dormant for 30 years. And then all of a sudden we've got grumpy cat and doge dog and sad Ben Affleck. Memes are units of cultural inheritance, which are analogous to genes because the end of the selfish gene. A catchy tune will spread through the population. People will whistle it or sing it, hum it, and others will copy them and whistle it. That's aspreadable meme with high survival value in the meme osphere. So there is a potential for Darwinian evolution going on.
Transcript
Play full episode