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“Dad, you’re such a meme!” said Megan, when I walked into the room asking for help with storage for my cell phone. She and my other teen, Andrew, chuckled as if something very funny had just happened.
I paused. And then I asked: “Do you kids even know what a meme is?!”
They laughed their heads off.
They then went on to explain to me, in clear (yet misguided) terms, what a meme is. After a few sentences, they looked at each other and laughed again, realizing that explaining this concept to me was pretty much a lost cause.
Hey, I know who Grumpy Cat is. I have seen the Honey Badger video plenty of times. And yeah, I’ve seen the video of that guy who lost his pants on American Idol...
What Is a Meme?
Guess what, Generation Z? On behalf of the slightly seasoned generation that I represent, I have news for you. And it is this: The concept of meme was established by renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (b. 1941) in his classic expose of the evolution of life, The Selfish Gene. Professor Dawkins was interested in the evolution of culture. And he wanted to help us understand how the evolution of human culture is a subset of the evolution of life on earth.
According to Professor Dawkins, a meme is essentially a unit of cultural evolution. An idea. A concept.
A meme is parallel to a gene in many ways. Dawkins saw a meme as the basic unit of replication when it comes to cultural evolution. A meme is an idea or bit of culture that has the capacity to replicate into future generations. The pentatonic scale was a great meme. The notes in that scale have made it into millions of songs. The "That’s the ticket!" skit from Saturday Night Live was a meme, leading to all kinds of variants. Whoever first painted a still life created quite a meme. Disco was a meme. "We are two wild and crazy guys!" was a meme. And so forth.
As is true of some biological adaptations, some cultural adaptations demonstrate a proclivity to replicate at higher rates compared with others. These memes are essentially adaptive in the parlance of cultural evolution.
As I wrote in my textbook on evolutionary psychology (Geher, 2014):
In "The Selfish Gene," Dawkins created the term meme, which is, as he conceptualizes it, a cultural unit that has the capacity to be replicated—much like a gene. It’s a piece of human culture or an idea. The beauty of this idea is that it still can be understood in terms of evolution! Some ideas catch on (think: a cell phone!). Some ideas mutate (think about how modern dance music has its roots in the Bee Gees songs of the 1970s—it’s true!). Some ideas never catch on (you may not remember the Beta videotape, which is proof in itself that it never caught on!).
In humans, cultural evolution is obviously huge and, importantly, it happens fast! Organic evolution takes thousands of generations to make important and observable changes in a population. However, in a very short amount of time, Justin Bieber’s fun and poppy style took the world by storm, leading to Bieber Fever (which would easily have been observable by anthropologists from Mars [if there are any!]—especially with his 3-D movie that was released in 2011). Nothing shows the powerful and fast-acting nature of cultural evolution more than does Bieber Fever (and I haven’t even gone into how his hairstyle alone captivated a generation! That hair is some meme!).
So when we’re thinking about where human behavior originates, evolutionists will often start by thinking about adaptations shaped by natural and sexual selection. Given Darwin’s big ideas, this is a powerful starting point. However, there are other important evolutionary forces at work as well—including drift, multi-level selection, and cultural evolution—along with the all-important concept of evolutionary by-products. Good evolutionary psychologists show a clear understanding of all these concepts and apply them to their understanding of human behavior when appropriate.
How Modern Conceptions of Memes Connect with Dawkins’ Definition
So I got thinking about how my kids’ understanding of the meme concept follows from and connects with Dawkins’ reasoning. Think about Grumpy Cat, for instance. According to her Wikipedia page, Grumpy Cat (actually named Tardar Sauce, by the way) has more than 2 million followers on Instagram and more than 1 million followers on Twitter.
The idea of Grumpy Cat really took off! This cultural concept had the capacity to replicate and to make it into the minds of millions of people. In short: What a meme!
Bottom Line
Sure, I may wear denim-on-denim, refer to texts as "emails," and have no idea how to do “the Snapchat.” But the second you tell me that I’m too old to know what a meme is, I’d say that you have crossed the line. In fact, as an evolutionary scholar, let me tell you a thing or two about memes! The concept of the meme goes back to Dawkins (1976) in his major expose of evolution in The Selfish Gene. And the meme concept bears strongly on the evolution of human nature.
What exactly is a meme? And how does this concept relate to our understanding of the human condition? I say cut back on the TikTok, Jacob Sartorius, 'Lil Dicky, and Bhad Bhabie. And crack open some Richard Dawkins.
References
Dawkins, R. (1976/1989). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Geher, G. (2014). Evolutionary Psychology 101. New York: Springer.
