The Selfish Idea: A Brief History of the Meme

A meme is a unit of culture, a self-replicating idea that propagates through a population. Coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976, the term was originally a theoretical concept to explain how cultural information spreads and evolves in a manner analogous to a biological Gene. In this view, melodies, catchphrases, fashion trends, and architectural styles are all memes, competing for limited space in human minds and societies. They replicate through imitation, vary through misinterpretation or intentional alteration, and are selected based on their fitness—their ability to be remembered, understood, and passed on. In the 21st century, the term has become overwhelmingly associated with its most prolific and visible descendant: the internet meme. These digital artifacts—typically images, videos, or text formats that are remixed and shared virally across online platforms—are the modern incarnation of this ancient principle. They represent the acceleration of cultural evolution, supercharged by the frictionless transmission medium of the Internet, where an idea can infect millions of minds not in centuries or years, but in hours.

Long before the hum of a single Computer, and before the word “meme” was ever conceived, the engine of memetic evolution was already churning in the crucible of human society. Culture, in its essence, is a tapestry woven from these replicating ideas. The first memes were not digital images but flickers of insight carried on the currents of Language, humanity’s first great sharing network. A new way to knap flint, a cautionary tale about a sabre-toothed cat whispered around a fire, the melody of a ritual chant—these were the proto-memes. Their survival depended on the fallible, high-stakes medium of human memory and oral tradition.

In the vast expanse of prehistory, memetic transmission was a slow, intimate affair. An idea could only travel as fast as a person could walk, and it replicated with the fidelity of a story told from one generation to the next. Variation was constant and unintentional; details were lost, embellished, or conflated, leading to a gradual, almost geological pace of cultural drift. Yet, even in this era, certain ideas proved remarkably “sticky.” The design of a hand-axe, a foundational technological meme, spread across continents and remained stable for over a million years, a testament to its raw utility. Myths of a great flood, a creation from chaos, or a trickster god-figure appeared in disconnected civilizations, suggesting a kind of convergent memetic evolution, where similar human minds produced similar conceptual solutions to life's great mysteries. The first great leap in memetic technology was the advent of symbolic representation. The breathtaking cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet, dating back over 30,000 years, were more than just art. They were memes frozen in time and space, a way to anchor a concept—the spirit of the hunt, the power of a bison—to a physical location, making it more permanent and potent. This was followed by the revolutionary technology of Writing, which allowed ideas to be encoded onto clay, papyrus, or parchment. For the first time, a meme could replicate with near-perfect fidelity, detached from the flawed memory of its human host. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Code of Hammurabi, the Vedas—these complex memeplexes (collections of interlocking memes) could now be copied and transported, surviving the death of their authors and the fall of their civilizations.

Centuries later, long before the digital age, a curious and whimsical phenomenon offered a stunning preview of the viral mechanics that would one day define the internet. During World War II, a simple doodle began to appear wherever American soldiers went. It was a cartoon of a bald-headed man with a prominent nose, peeking over a wall, accompanied by the simple phrase: “Kilroy was here.” The origin of Kilroy Was Here is shrouded in legend, most commonly traced to a shipyard inspector named James J. Kilroy who supposedly chalked the phrase on ships to mark his work. But its source was ultimately irrelevant. The meme’s power lay in its elegant simplicity and its participatory nature. It was an inside joke for millions of GIs. Finding it in a surprising or remote location—a newly captured bunker, the torch of the Statue of Liberty, a bathroom in Potsdam during the Allied leaders' conference—was a delightful affirmation of a shared, ubiquitous presence. It was a symbol of victory, of home, and of the anonymous serviceman’s ability to leave his mark. Soldiers replicated it endlessly, not because they were ordered to, but because they wanted to. It was easy to draw, universally recognizable to its intended audience, and imbued with a sense of playful defiance. Kilroy Was Here demonstrated the core principles of a successful meme:

• Fidelity: The design and phrase were simple enough to be copied accurately every time.
• Fecundity: It was replicated at an immense rate across the globe.
• Longevity: The meme persisted for years, becoming an icon of its era.

Kilroy was a ghost in the machine of global conflict, a benign virus of culture that spread through chalk, paint, and pencil. It was the analog ancestor of the internet meme, a proof of concept for how a simple idea, given the right conditions and a large enough network, could achieve a life of its own.

For millennia, these cultural replicators operated in the background, shaping civilizations as an invisible and unnamed force. The phenomenon was observable—historians tracked the spread of religions, linguists mapped the evolution of words, and archaeologists followed the diffusion of pottery styles—but the underlying mechanism lacked a name and a theory. That changed in 1976, within the pages of a revolutionary book on evolutionary biology.

In The Selfish Gene, British biologist Richard Dawkins presented a radical, gene-centric view of evolution. He argued that the fundamental unit of natural selection was not the species or the individual, but the Gene itself—the “immortal coil” of DNA. Organisms, including humans, were merely “survival machines,” elaborate vessels built by genes to protect and propagate themselves. A chicken, as the saying goes, is just an egg's way of making another egg. This elegant and powerful idea reframed the entire story of life. Towards the end of his book, Dawkins made a daring intellectual leap. He asked: could this same principle of selfish replication apply to human culture? Was there a cultural equivalent to the Gene? He proposed that there was, and he needed a name for it. He wrote:

“We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. '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.”

With that, the meme was born, not in the ether of the internet, but in the realm of biological theory. Dawkins defined it as a unit of imitation, a “mind virus.” Just as genes propagate themselves by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, memes propagate themselves by leaping from brain to brain. They do this through the broad process of imitation, which includes listening, reading, watching, and copying.

Dawkins argued that for any replicator to drive evolution, it must possess three key characteristics. The meme, he contended, had them all:

1. Replication (Fidelity): A meme must be able to create copies of itself. When you tell a friend a catchy tune you heard, you are aiding in the replication of a musical meme. While cultural replication is far less precise than genetic replication, it is effective enough for the core idea to survive. The invention of the Printing Press, and later, digital media, dramatically increased the fidelity of memetic copying.
2. Variation (Fecundity): Memes must be able to change. An urban legend is retold with new details, a joke’s punchline is altered, a recipe is tweaked. This variation can be accidental (misremembering a story) or intentional (adapting a fashion style). Variation is the raw material for evolution; without it, nothing new can emerge.
3. Selection (Longevity): Not all memes are created equal. In the fierce competition for human attention and memory, some memes are better at surviving and replicating than others. This is “survival of the fittest” applied to ideas. A tune is selected for being catchy, a scientific theory for its explanatory power, a safety rule for its life-saving utility, and a joke for its humor.

This framework was revolutionary. It suggested that culture was not merely a product of human intention but an evolutionary system in its own right, with its own agenda. Ideas weren't just passive tools; they were active agents, “selfish” replicators colonizing human minds for their own propagation. The human brain was their primordial soup.

Dawkins’ theory of memetics remained largely in the domain of academics and intellectuals for over a decade. It was a powerful but abstract idea, awaiting a medium that could make its evolutionary process not only visible but explosive. That medium was forged in the quiet hum of university mainframes and government networks: the early Internet. The pre-commercial internet of the 1980s and early 1990s was a sparse, text-based world. It was a realm of specialists, academics, and hobbyists communicating through Usenet newsgroups, bulletin board systems (BBS), and Email. In this digital cradle, communication was deliberate and slow by today’s standards, yet it was here that the first recognizably digital memes were born. They were not images or videos, but pure ideas encoded in ASCII text.

One of the earliest and most influential digital memes was born out of a simple problem of miscommunication. In text-only environments, tone is notoriously difficult to convey. Sarcasm, irony, and humor were frequently misinterpreted, leading to pointless arguments, known as “flame wars.” On September 19, 1982, in a discussion on a Carnegie Mellon University computer science message board, a physicist named Scott Fahlman proposed a solution. His post, retrieved from a backup tape years later, read:

“I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:



Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use:

”

It was an ingenious solution—a simple, elegant meme. The Smiley, or emoticon, used existing characters to create a visual representation of human emotion. It was a “tone-of-voice” meme designed to improve the fitness of other memes (jokes) by ensuring they were understood correctly. The Smiley spread with astonishing speed. Within months, it had appeared on ARPANET and Usenet groups across the United States and beyond. It varied almost immediately; the hyphen “nose” was often dropped `:)`, and new emoticons for winking `;)`, surprise `:O`, and countless others emerged. It was a perfect case study in memetic evolution. It replicated through imitation, it varied as users adapted it, and it was selected for its immense utility in clarifying communication. It became a fundamental part of digital Language, a native species of the new online ecosystem.

Another titan of early internet culture was not a symbol, but a social observation that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. In 1990, the American attorney and author Mike Godwin, a regular on Usenet, noticed a recurring pattern in online discussions. No matter how esoteric or mundane the topic—from science fiction to programming—long, heated arguments invariably seemed to invoke comparisons to Hitler or the Nazis. He decided to formalize this observation, partly as a sociological experiment. He posited what came to be known as Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” Godwin's Law was a meme about memes. It was a piece of cultural code that described the behavior of its environment. By naming the phenomenon, the law itself became a tool within those discussions. Citing “Godwin's Law” became a common way to signal that a debate had devolved into meaningless hyperbole, often ending the thread. The law spread far beyond Usenet, becoming a widely recognized axiom of internet discourse. It was a purely conceptual meme, a self-replicating rule that successfully colonized countless online conversations, demonstrating that the most potent replicators didn't need a picture—they just needed to be true enough, and useful enough, to be repeated.

The slow, text-based evolution of the digital cradle was shattered in the mid-1990s by the arrival of a revolutionary new platform: the World Wide Web. With the invention of the web browser Mosaic, which could display images alongside text, the Internet was transformed from a library of documents into a multimedia wonderland. This was the memetic equivalent of the Cambrian Explosion, the biological event half a billion years ago when life on Earth suddenly diversified into a dazzling array of new forms. The web's new visual capabilities created a fertile environment for a new, more powerful class of meme to emerge.

In 1996, a bizarre and mesmerizing 3D animation began to circulate via Email chains and early websites. It was a short, looping video of a CGI baby in a diaper, grooving to the intro of “Hooked on a Feeling” by Blue Swede. Officially named “Baby Cha-Cha,” it became known to the world simply as the Dancing Baby. Created by a team of 3D artists to showcase the capabilities of their software, the file was never intended for mass distribution. But once it escaped into the wild, it became one of the first truly global viral phenomena. Its spread was a testament to the power of novelty. Nobody had seen anything quite like it. It was weird, uncanny, and strangely hypnotic. The Dancing Baby transcended language and culture, its appeal based on pure visual absurdity. It became so famous that it made recurring appearances on the popular TV show Ally McBeal, representing the first time an internet meme had successfully crossed over into mainstream broadcast media. It was a signal that this new digital culture was no longer a niche hobby; it was becoming a force capable of shaping mass entertainment.

If the Dancing Baby represented the viral potential of a single, monolithic piece of content, the next great evolutionary leap came from memes that invited participation and remixing. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a poorly translated phrase from the opening cutscene of the 1991 Japanese video game Zero Wing began to surface in online forums. The phrase was: “All your base are belong to us.” The meme began as an in-joke among gamers, celebrated for its “Engrish” absurdity. But its true power was unleashed when users started photoshopping the phrase onto everything imaginable: news photos, historical images, movie posters, and road signs. This was a critical development. The meme was no longer just the original source material; it was a flexible, adaptable template. It was a “snowclone,” a phrasal template that could be filled with new content. The “All Your Base” phenomenon demonstrated that the most successful memes were not just passively consumed but actively used. They were tools for creativity and humor. The rapid proliferation of “All Your Base” images, music videos, and merchandise showcased the nascent power of digital remix culture. It was a collaborative, decentralized creative process, where thousands of anonymous individuals collectively built upon a shared joke, pushing it further into the cultural consciousness. This participatory model would become the dominant paradigm for memetic evolution in the years to come.

The early 2000s were the Wild West of internet memes. They spread through a patchwork of forums, Email, and personal websites. Discovering a new meme felt like a secret handshake, a sign that you were part of a burgeoning digital subculture. But this fragmented ecosystem was about to be consolidated and supercharged by a new technological and social force: Social Media. The rise of platforms like YouTube (2005), Facebook (2004), and Twitter (2006) fundamentally re-engineered the fabric of the Internet. They were designed for one primary purpose: to make sharing content as frictionless as possible. The “Like,” “Share,” and “Retweet” buttons became the most efficient memetic replication drives ever invented. With a single click, an idea could be broadcast to hundreds of friends, who could then broadcast it to their friends, creating the potential for exponential, pandemic-like spread. This was the beginning of the great acceleration.

In this new, fast-paced environment, memes evolved for speed and legibility. The most successful format to emerge from this era was the image macro: a simple, reusable image overlaid with bold, white Impact font text, typically with a top line and a bottom line. This format was the memetic equivalent of a standardized shipping container—it provided a simple, universal grammar for creating and understanding jokes. The pioneers of this form were the LOLcats, photos of cats accompanied by humorous, intentionally ungrammatical captions (e.g., “I Can Has Cheezburger?”). Popularized by blogs and websites dedicated to the format, LOLcats were an early glimpse into the power of a repeatable template. Soon after, the “Advice Animals” genre exploded, featuring a recurring cast of characters, each with a distinct personality and comedic premise:

• Advice Dog: A colorful puppy offering terrible, nonsensical advice.
• Courage Wolf: Dispensing aggressive, often reckless motivation.
• Socially Awkward Penguin: Narrating the minor anxieties of everyday social life.
• Success Kid: A baby clenching a fist in triumph, used to celebrate small, personal victories.

These formats democratized meme creation. One didn't need Photoshop skills or video editing software anymore. Meme generator websites allowed anyone to create their own version of a popular meme in seconds. This marked a crucial shift from memes as content to memes as frameworks. The individual image was no longer the meme; the meme was the exploitable template, the set of rules and associations that governed its use.

Alongside the image macro, other forms of participatory memes flourished. Rickrolling, which emerged from the anonymous forum 4chan in 2007, was a classic bait-and-switch prank. Users would post a hyperlink promising something interesting, but the link would lead to the music video for Rick Astley's 1987 song “Never Gonna Give You Up.” The meme's success lay not in the content itself, but in the shared experience of the prank—both the delight of the prankster and the grudging respect of the duped. Another dominant force was the Rage Comic, a series of crudely drawn, black-and-white cartoon faces expressing a range of simple, exaggerated emotions (“Rage Guy,” “Trollface,” “Forever Alone”). These faces were a visual vocabulary used to create simple, relatable comics about everyday frustrations and triumphs. Like image macros, they were an accessible framework, allowing millions to share personal anecdotes through a common, universally understood visual Language. The age of platforms turned meme culture from a niche hobby into a global pastime. Memes were no longer just jokes; they were a primary mode of communication, a way to express identity, emotion, and belonging in the vast, impersonal space of the digital world.

In the 2010s and 2020s, the evolution of memes entered a new, more complex and chaotic phase. The great acceleration, driven by Social Media, had reached its zenith. Memes were now the dominant cultural currency of the internet, a ubiquitous and powerful force shaping everything from marketing and entertainment to social justice and political warfare. The modern meme is no longer a simple joke but a complex, multi-layered, and often self-referential form of communication that can be as profound as it is absurd.

As meme formats became saturated, a new evolutionary pressure emerged: the need for novelty and irony. Users who had grown up online developed a deep, almost instinctual literacy in the language of memes. To appeal to this audience, memes began to turn inward, deconstructing and satirizing their own conventions. This led to the rise of surreal and deep-fried memes. Deep-fried memes are image macros that have been intentionally degraded. They are passed through so many filters, JPEG compression cycles, and color saturation effects that they become a distorted, visually “loud” artifact. This aesthetic is a meta-commentary on the very nature of digital replication—a joke about how images decay as they are endlessly shared. Surreal memes, on the other hand, abandon logic and narrative coherence entirely. They often feature recurring, god-like entities (“Meme Man”), bizarre objects (dodecahedrons, oranges), and nonsensical, misspelled captions (“Stonks,” “Enslaved Moisture”). They are a form of digital absurdism, rejecting the relatable, everyday humor of earlier formats in favor of an esoteric, dream-like logic. These trends represent the increasing sophistication of meme culture, evolving from simple jokes into a form of avant-garde digital art.

The most significant development of the modern era is the weaponization and mobilization of memes as tools of power. Their ability to distill complex ideas into simple, emotionally resonant, and highly shareable packages makes them incredibly effective instruments of persuasion.

• In Politics: Memes have become a staple of political campaigning and activism. They are used to build community among supporters, ridicule opponents, and spread political messages with a speed and reach that traditional media cannot match. They have been instrumental in grassroots movements and, more darkly, have become primary vectors for the spread of disinformation and extremist ideologies. The same mechanics that make a cat picture go viral can be used to spread a conspiracy theory.
• In Economics: The power of memetic belief systems spilled into the financial world with the “meme stock” phenomenon of 2021. Small-time retail investors, organized on platforms like Reddit, collectively bought shares of struggling companies like GameStop, driven by a flurry of memes, in-jokes, and a shared narrative of fighting against Wall Street hedge funds. They demonstrated that a powerful, collectively held meme could have tangible, billion-dollar consequences in the real world.

The modern meme is a double-edged sword. It is a source of immense creativity, collective joy, and social cohesion. It is a new folk art, a global language that transcends borders. Yet, it is also a tool for manipulation, a vector for discord, and a reflection of our most polarized instincts. The meme has, in a sense, achieved Dawkins' original vision: it is a “selfish” replicator that has found the perfect host in our globally networked society, often evolving and spreading without regard for the well-being of its human carriers. The journey of the meme—from a theoretical concept in a biology Book to the engine of 21st-century culture—is a story about humanity's timeless desire to share ideas. It is the story of how technology has repeatedly revolutionized that process, from the first cave painting to the instantaneous share button. The meme is not a fleeting fad; it is the manifestation of an ancient force, now operating at the speed of light. It is the ghost in our machine, the digital soul of our collective consciousness, and its own brief history is still being written, one share at a time.