Huh, looking it up for some reason I thought it was Chomsky who coined the term, but it was actually Dawkins, who actually tried to make an entire field out of this one idea (I remembered the name of the book it was articulated in, just misattributed its authorship in my head). Maybe because it’s linguistics adjacent and uses the common linguistic element suffix “-eme”, so I just assumed the concept came out of linguistics instead of a biologist not staying in his lane.
Dawkins wasn’t the one who tried to make memetics into a real field of study. He basically just threw the idea out in The Selfish Gene as a “Look how you can apply this idea to other things too, aren’t I super fucking smart” deal.
Huh, looking it up for some reason I thought it was Chomsky who coined the term, but it was actually Dawkins, who actually tried to make an entire field out of this one idea (I remembered the name of the book it was articulated in, just misattributed its authorship in my head). Maybe because it’s linguistics adjacent and uses the common linguistic element suffix “-eme”, so I just assumed the concept came out of linguistics instead of a biologist not staying in his lane.
Dawkins wasn’t the one who tried to make memetics into a real field of study. He basically just threw the idea out in The Selfish Gene as a “Look how you can apply this idea to other things too, aren’t I super fucking smart” deal.