Totally unrelated though, and just a coincidence. The word meme in the way we use it today was coined by Richard Dawkins in (IIRC) The Extended Phenotype. I presume it’s an abbreviation of Mental Gene, or something like that. The idea was that a meme is an idea or concept that can fight for survival amongst other ideas, just as a gene tries to survive being being a good fit to its environment
Memetics is a theory of the evolution of culture based on Darwinian principles with the meme as the unit of culture. The term “meme” was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, to illustrate the principle that he later called “Universal Darwinism”.
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Richard Dawkins (1976) apparently coined the word meme independently of Semon, writing this:
“‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory’, or to the French word même.”
it’s not the same. I don’t think she even shares the Greek entomology root with meme
