The meme – an indispensable part of today ‘s language, it has formed its very own subculture especially on the Internet, to which entire websites are dedicated.
But what is a meme, “Is it a genius, a demon? […] even a breath of fashion […]? Where does it come from? Where will it go? […] can it be directed?” (translated analogously after Herder, 1793, p. [5].)
In 1979, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in his book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins believes that cultural transmission is analogous to the genetic one, as it can give rise to some kind of evolution (Dawkins 1979, p. 245). For this novel replicator, which conveys the idea of cultural transmission or imitation, he chose the term meme, modified off ancient Greek mīmēma, meaning “imitated”. According to Dawkins, a meme is kind of an autonomous construct that spreads like genes in the gene pool, passing from body to body via sperm or eggs – as memes spreading in the meme pool by jumping from brain to brain, which he broadly refers to as imitation (Dawkins 2016). In 2013, Dawkins expresses himself about his original thought, because the “idea of the meme itself has mutated and evolved in a new direction […]” (Dawkins, 2013, 04:09-04:14) (Feast 2014). The Internet has „hijacked the idea of the meme“, and the cornerstone is considered to be Scott E. Fahlman’s “sideways smiley” “:-)”, who thus probably created the first “Internet meme” as early as September the 19th, 1982 (Börzsei 2013). The participatory nature of Internet has made memes a social phenomenon that can be created, modified and disseminated by its users (Barnes, Riesenmy et al. 2021). However, memes are not only a humorous and simple form of communication, they also draw attention to controversial cultural and political issues (Brodie 2009). Today’s concept of Internet memes goes back to Mike Godwin (Godwin 1994, Knobel and Lankshear 2007), where, simply put, it acts as a kind of marker that determines the “value and reach” of a discussion or post. Thus an (Internet) meme is a piece of culture, in the form of a joke, that gains influence by spreading across the Internet (Davison 2012). Memes are usually easy to grasp, but not all can be understood without (little) prior knowledge.
So, what has Dawkins Meme in common with the object of the month and the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena? In the holdings of the ThULB is a copy of Richard Semon’s “Die Mneme” from 1904, a gift from Ernst Haeckel to the former library of the Zoological Institute. Richard Semon (1859-1918) studied zoology under Haeckel in 1879 and later worked at the university for more than 10 years. Semon gained international attention through his research trip and publication on the “Ceratodus” (Australian lungfish) (for more information see Uschmann 1959, Hoßfeld 2005).
In Munich 1904, Semon published his book Die Mneme als erhaltendes Prinzip im Wechsel des organischen Geschehens. As the title already suggests, Dawkin’s idea of the meme is by no means a novel consideration, as these can already be found in Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia (Darwin 1794/96), for example.
Semons’s mneme origins from ancient Greek, too, and can be translated as memory or recollection. However, Semon rejected these words on purely polemical grounds (Semon 1904, p. 20). Semon holds the view, that stimuli have an engraphic effect on an organism “because it engraves or inscribes itself into organic substance”. This change by the stimulus he refers to as an engram. The sum of engrams of an organism are its mneme. Just as memes are inherited and acquired, mnemes can be inherited and acquired. In addition to his mneme theory, Semon also defined and coined the terms “engram” and “ecphory” (the process of remembering), for which he is considered a pioneer in neurology (Josselyn, Köhler et al. 2017, Larner, Leff et al. 2022). Semon’s theory of mneme is by no means flawless and neglects the topic of forgetting. To explain his theory in more detail would go far beyond the scope, so reference shall be made to two excellent reviews by Daniel Schacter and Stefan Rieger (Schacter, Eich et al. 1978, Rieger 1998, see also Schacter 2012). Although the terms introduced by Semon are still used today, almost nobody knows their origin or inventor (Rupp-Eisenreich 1997).
Until today Richard Dawkins is regarded as the “inventor of the meme and the meme theory” (Vada 2015), although his idea and concept show astonishing similarities with that of Semon. Schacter (1978 u. 2012) has already shown several times that Semon’s works have remained relatively unknown, despite after Semon’s death there was an English version under the title “The Mneme” (Semon 1921). His Mneme got criticism and appeal in the professional world, which should have been known to Dawkins (Rupp-Eisenreich 1997, Laurent 1999). Among these authors are well-known ones, such as Semon’s good friend, psychiatrist and entomologist Auguste Forel, the British philosopher Bertrand Russel, Nobel Prize winner Erwin Schrödinger and the zoologist and neurophysiologist Zachary Young, just to name few. Even Karl Lashley, in his well-known publication “In search of the engram” (Lashley 1960), refrains from referring to Semon, nor does he explicitly question his ideas, which contributed to Semon’s years in oblivion. It is already hard to imagine that Dawkins did not at least know Maeterlinck’s The Life of the White Ant (1927), in which he reflects on “memory” of social insects and partly adopts Semon’s ideas on page 198, “engrammata upon the individual mneme” (Laurent 1999). Later, Maeterlinck was accused of serious plagiarism for his book (Vermeulen 2008, Vada 2015). We do not know whether Dawkins used Semon’s work. With certainty, both were kissed by the same muse, as apart from one letter and little more than 70 years, nothing separates the two neologisms mneme and meme – even the theory is almost identical. But, as Dawkins commented in 2013 that “the idea of meme has been hijacked”, the story of the m[n]eme seems to be a story of hijacking.
Bernhard Leopold Bock
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