Who invented the idea of memes?

Dawkins is credited with naming “memes” in The Selfish Gene, and the essay treats that naming as the version that made the idea durable. It also argues that the broader notion of ideas spreading and changing had already appeared before 1976 and keeps resurfacing in later work.

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• Dawkins coined “meme” in The Selfish Gene as a name for a unit of cultural transmission or imitation.
• The essay says memetics has had major difficulty becoming a science because no solid account explains culture through variation, heredity, and differential reproduction.
• Dawkins’ formulation is presented as the best and most falsifiable version of cultural evolution, and the name “meme” is said to work well and to have helped the idea spread.
• The author says Dawkins did not invent the underlying notion, since Gregory Bateson had already published Steps to an Ecology of Mind in 1972 with a similar question about ideas living and dying.
• The piece links the spread of ideas to broader problems of originality, authorship, and cryptomnesia in academic work.
• It argues that many ideas recur across fields and eras, with later writers often rediscovering or rephrasing earlier claims.
• The text contrasts art with science and philosophy by saying art is more fluid about influence and attribution.
• It says the information age makes originality harder because information is now archived, searchable, and effectively immortal.
• The essay closes by describing the feeling that even a new essay may already exist somewhere in pieces across the digital record.