The word meme is a shortening ( modeled on gene ) of mimeme ( from Ancient Greek μίμημα mīmēma, " something imitated ", from μιμεῖσθαι mimeisthai, " to imitate ", from μῖμος mimos " mime ") and it was coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene ( 1976 ) as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.

To emphasize commonality with genes, Dawkins coined the term " meme " by shortening " mimeme ", which derives from the Greek word mimema (" something imitated ").

Dawkins apparently did not intend to present a comprehensive theory of memetics in The Selfish Gene, but rather coined the term meme in a speculative spirit.

In this article, Dawkins coined the term faith-sufferer.

Dawkins uses the term concestor — coined by Nicky Warren — for the most recent common ancestor at each rendezvous point.

Dawkins uses the word " concestor " ( coined by Nicky Warren ) as an alternative to LCA.

" At the same time he coined " biomorph " for these patterns, the famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins used the word to refer to his own set of biological shapes that were arrived at by a very different procedure.

The word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins for his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, although his concept refers to a much broader category of cultural information.

The term " mytheme " is analogous to, if not virtually the same in " signification " ( a favorite term of Roland Barthes, another famous structuralist ) as " meme ", a word coined by Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene ( 1976 ).

The term has declined in popularity, and the older term meme ( coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene ( 1976 )) is now used in its stead almost universally ( even by Wilson in his later writings ).

In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins coined the term memes to describe informational units that can be transmitted culturally, analogous to genes.

In the United Kingdom the term often retains its positive sense as a reference to natural selection, and for example Richard Dawkins wrote in his collection of essays A Devil's Chaplain, published in 2003, that as a scientist he is a Darwinist.

Others, including Dawkins himself, have argued that this usage of the term is the result of a misunderstanding of the original proposal.

Dawkins used the term to refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator.

In his book The Selfish Gene ( 1976 ), the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins used the term meme to describe a unit of human cultural transmission analogous to the gene, arguing that replication also happens in culture, albeit in a different sense.

* The term memetics is first proposed by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene.

This term is also used in the scientific literature, with the academic publishers Blackwell Publishing referring to " neo-Darwinism as practised today ", and some figures in the study of evolution like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, using the term in their writings and lectures.

In his book The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins introduced the term " hierarchical reductionism " to describe the view that complex systems can be described with a hierarchy of organizations, each of which is only described in terms of objects one level down in the hierarchy.

Dawkins ' analogy in the aforementioned Guardian article is instructive, comparing the coining of bright to the " triumph of consciousness-raising " from the term gay:

For example, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry published an article by Chris Mooney titled " Not Too ' Bright '" in which he stated that, although he agreed with the movement, Richard Dawkins ' and Daniel Dennett's " campaign to rename religious unbelievers ' brights ' could use some rethinking " because of the possibility that the term would be misinterpreted.

According to the book Skeptics Dictionary, Chopra's " mind-body claims get even murkier as he tries to connect Ayurveda with quantum physics .” Chopra also participated in the Channel 4 ( UK ) documentary The Enemies of Reason, where, when interviewed by scientist Richard Dawkins, he admitted that the term " quantum theory " was being used as a metaphor and that it has little to do with the actual quantum theory in physics.

IIn 1979, the term was used by Dawkins and Krelos to refer to the exageration of pre-existing signs induced by social parasites, noting the manipulation of baby birds ( hosts ) from these, to illustrate the effectiveness of those signals

Dawkins also created a parody of the criticism of atheism, coining the term athorism, or the firm belief that the Norse deity Thor does not exist.

Dawkins defends his choice of the word " population " by writing " Population may seem an odd word, but it is the correct statistical term.

In The God Delusion, anti-religion activist Richard Dawkins uses the term " consciousness raising " for several other things, explicitly describing these as analogous to the feminist case.

In response to criticism over the use of the term " cattle " to describe non-believers, Hasan wrote in his New Statesman blog: " The Quranic phrase ' people of no intelligence ' simply and narrowly refers to the fact that Muslims regard their views on God as the only intellectually tenable position, just as atheists ( like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris ) regard believers as fundamentally irrational and, even, mentally deficient.

However, some biologists, most famously Richard Dawkins, prefer to think of evolution in terms of competition between single genes, which have the welfare of the organism ' in mind ' only insofar as that welfare furthers their own selfish drives for replication.

This project has not, according to one view, been especially successful ; for example, Richard Dawkins describes how we must rise above our selfish genes to behave morally ( that is, evolution has endowed us with various instincts, but we need some other moral system to decide which ones to empower or control ).

Therefore people like Dawkins in England who still think the gene is the target of selection are evidently wrong.

Dawkins wrote that evolution depended not on the particular chemical basis of genetics, but only on the existence of a self-replicating unit of transmission — in the case of biological evolution, the gene.

The idea of the phenotype has been generalized by Richard Dawkins in The Extended Phenotype to mean all the effects a gene has on the outside world that may influence its chances of being replicated.

Dawkins writes that gene combinations which help an organism to survive and reproduce tend to also improve the gene's own chances of being passed on and, as a result, frequently " successful " genes will also be beneficial to the organism.

* In River Out of Eden, Richard Dawkins discusses human ancestry in the context of a river of genes and shows that Mitochondrial Eve is one of the many common ancestors we can trace back to via different gene pathways.

In The Selfish Gene, author Richard Dawkins asserts the gene is the only true unit of selection.

Dawkins develops this idea by pointing to the effect that a gene may have on an organism's environment through that organism's behaviour, citing as examples caddis houses and beaver dams.

" Some biologists such as Richard Dawkins suggest that the individual selected is the gene, while computer simulations like Daisyworld suggest that biological selection occurs at multiple levels simultaneously.

According to Dawkins, genes cause phenotypes and a gene is ' judged ' by its phenotypic effects.

In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins goes on to provide a graphical model of gene selection involving entities he calls biomorphs.

* 2001 Dr. Richard Dawkins, Oxford University, for his work in the ethology of the gene, redirecting the focus of the “ levels of selection ” debate from the individual animal as the unit of evolution to the genes.

Put another way, Dawkins states:

In a review of Full House, Richard Dawkins approved of Gould's general argument, but suggested that he saw evidence of a " tendency for lineages to improve cumulatively their adaptive fit to their particular way of life, by increasing the numbers of features which combine together in adaptive complexes.

Richard Dawkins notes ( in Blackmore 2000: The Meme machine, page 13 ), that Memes can be copied in a Lamarckian way ( copying of the product ) or in a Weismann-type evolutionary way ( copying of the instruction ) which is much more resistant against changes.

Richard Dawkins refers to weak agnostics as " Temporary Agnostics in Practice " ( TAPs ), and he considers them to be reasonable people due to the lack of certainty one way or the other.

The Sixers advanced all the way to the NBA Finals that year, and Dawkins was called upon to help battle Portland ’ s Bill Walton.

According to the documentary, Dawkins added that chapter as a way of overcoming modern day misinterpretations of the concept of " survival of the fittest ".

In a video entitled " The Four Horsemen " starring Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett, Dennett refers to consciousness-raising amongst philosophers regarding the distinction between puzzles and problems as a better way of referring to " mysteries ".

), 2006, Richard Dawkins: how a scientist changed the way we think, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

While this is not strictly correct, as the 8th iteration of the sample run to the right shows, the conservation of overall similarity to a target of a kind that Dawkins himself acknowledges is foreign to the evolutionary process seems to be a valid caution against accepting the model as a proof, rather than an interesting demonstration of the way characters could be preserved from generation to generation given an appropriate selection mechanism.