Oct 8, 2020 · How far back do memes go? What were the first internet memes? Learn more about Pepe the Frog's ancestors in this quick history.

Richard Dawkins coined the word meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Although Richard Dawkins invented the term meme and developed meme theory, he has not claimed that the idea was entirely novel, [22] and there have been other expressions for similar ideas in the past. [23]

May 17, 2023 · But where did memes originate, and how have they evolved over the years? Let’s take a journey through the history of memes. The Birth of the Meme. Before memes filled our social media feeds, the concept of a meme was born in the field of evolutionary biology.

Mar 18, 2025 · meme, unit of cultural information spread by imitation. The term meme (from the Greek mimema, meaning “imitated”) was introduced in 1976 by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his work The Selfish Gene.

Mar 20, 2024 · The history of memes is long, complicated and difficult to summarize, but here's a very brief overview of how they've evolved over the past few decades, beginning with the meaning and origin behind the term itself.

Meme isn't new: it dates to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene, where it functioned with a meaning other than its current most common one. In Dawkins' conception of the term, it is "a unit of cultural transmission"—the cultural equivalent of a gene:

Aug 31, 2024 · The term “meme” was coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. He described memes as units of cultural information that spread from person to...

Mar 13, 2019 · Richard Dawkins, noted Smart Guy and atheist, first coined the term “meme” in 1976, in his book, The Selfish Gene. In this first iteration, the idea was that ideas and thoughts were...

Jun 20, 2013 · Within the piece, Dawkins explains how an "internet meme" is a hijacking of the original idea and that instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, they...

Mar 27, 2019 · The History of Creating Memes. The invention and creation of Internet memes take their roots in the 21st century. Originally, the term “meme” was proposed by Richard Dawkins who described this word in his book “The Selfish Gene” published in 1976 (38).