Summary
A meme is an idea, belief or practice seen as a unit of culture, spread by copying from person to person. The biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word in ‘The Selfish Gene’ (1976), defining it as “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation”. He suggested that ideas, like genes, compete and are selected, and that what spreads best needn’t be true or good for its carriers.
A memeplex is a set of memes that support one another and travel together, such as a religion or political creed. Memetics, the resulting field, is criticised as loosely defined and unscientific; Dawkins cautioned against pushing the gene analogy too far.
Rationale
Here we differ. Memetics pictures culture as units lodged in individual heads, competing to be copied. We see dispositions as “continually being shaped by everything around us”, in bodies and surroundings as much as minds.