Science Friday - SciFri Extra: Science Diction On The Word 'Meme'

Episode Date: March 10, 2020

Remember that summer when the internet was one Distracted Boyfriend after another—that flannel-shirted dude rubbernecking at a passing woman, while his girlfriend glares at him? Everyone had their own take—the Boyfriend was you, staring directly at a solar eclipse, ignoring science. The Boyfriend was youth, seduced by socialism, spurning capitalism. The Boyfriend could be anyone you wanted him to be.    We think of memes as a uniquely internet phenomenon. But the word meme originally had nothing to do with the internet. It came from an evolutionary biologist who noticed that genes weren’t the only thing that spread, mutated, and evolved. Sign up for our newsletter, and stay up to speed with Science Diction.  Guest:  Gretchen McCulloch is an internet linguist. For some fun, check out her book, Because Internet, and her podcast Lingthusiasm. She’s also appeared on Science Friday. Footnotes And Further Reading: For an academic take on memes, read Memes in Digital Culture by Limor Shifman. Read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.    Check out the first time the word meme appeared in an internet context, in Mike Godwin’s 1994 Wired article called “Meme, Counter-meme.” Credits:  Science Diction is written and produced by Johanna Mayer, with production and editing help from Elah Feder. Our senior editor is Christopher Intagliata, and we had story editing help from Nathan Tobey. Our theme song and music are by Daniel Peterschmidt. We had fact-checking help from Michelle Harris. Special thanks to the entire Science Friday staff. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hi there. Today we've got a little treat in store for all the word nerds out there. We're launching a special series called Science Diction, a bite-sized podcast about words and the science stories behind them. Each episode will feature a single word and how it came to be and the science that happened along the way. For example, do you know where the word cell comes from? A scientist looked at a piece of cork under a microscope, and up close the cork looked like a bunch of tiny boxes, and they reminded him of rooms where monks would sleep, which were called cells. I just love that stuff, and that's the sort of thing you'll be hearing in science diction. And if you like what you hear today and you just can't wait till next week to get your hands on

more stories like these, subscribe to Science Diction. You can listen to all four episodes of the first season right now. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. So now I'm turning over the mic to our resident word nerd. here at Science Friday, Johanna Mayer. She'll be bringing you this series once a week for the next month. So stay tuned for some wordy, nerdy goodness. I think you're going to like it.

The first word we're diving into is meme. Here's science diction. If you've been on the internet at all the past few years, this song is ingrained in your brain. The original Gangnam style video has been viewed over three billion times. And it spawned endless parodies. Versions inspired by video games. And former presidential candidates.

Mitt Romney-style. And even the more cotidian. Working farmer style. Farmers style. Since Gangnam Styles heyday in 2012, approximately a gazillion memes have circulated the internet. And we think of memes as a phenomenon that's particularly born and bred online. But it turns out the word meme didn't actually come from the internet. It came from an evolutionary biologist.

From Science Friday, this is science diction. I'm Johanna Mayer. Today, we're talking about the word meme. You've probably used the word meme to talk about all sorts of stuff that you see online. But first, let's clear something up. What exactly is an internet meme? That's an interesting question. So I think of an internet meme as a unit of internet culture, a piece of internet culture that spreads through internet people or people on the internet, making their own versions of it.

That's Gretchen McCulloch. She's an internet linguist. Coolest job ever. And she wrote a really great book called Because Internet. So a meme spreads through people making other versions of it and through people putting their own spin on it. You don't just, you know, copy the thing that's been sent. Like the original Gangnam style video. You remake it to appeal to your particular subculture or to appeal to some other group of people or to mash it up with some other type of meme. Like Super Mario style or Mitt Romney's style. Last time you have to hear that, I promise. Okay.

So what is the connection to science here? Let's talk about that evolutionary biologist I mentioned. You've probably heard of Richard Dawkins. He wrote a book called The God Delusion. He's said some pretty controversial things about religion. But before all that, he worked on evolutionary theory and animal behavior. So in the 70s, he wrote a book called The Selfish Gene. And we know how genes spread.

Every time that a plant or an animal or really any living thing reproduces, it makes a copy of its genes. The more it reproduces, the more copies of these genes there are running around. That's the gist of evolution. But in the book, Dawkins talks about how the principles of evolution could work for other things, too, because genes aren't the only thing that spread and evolve. Ideas do too. Dawkins was looking for an ideological counterpart to the idea of a gene.

So he wanted to use the analogy of a gene spreading through sexual selection and physical reproductive fitness to apply this to the spread of ideas. So when it comes to biology, that thing that's spreading and reproducing and evolving and competing was called a gene. But when it came to culture and ideas, there wasn't a word for that thing. So Richard Dawkins made one up. He borrowed the Greek word mimema, which means imitation, and mashed it together with our English word gene. Mimema plus gene equals meme. But when Richard Dawkins coined the word meme, he didn't quite mean what we mean when we talk about internet memes today. First, obviously, didn't have to be on the internet because the internet didn't exist.

But also, the original meme didn't have to go viral or get remixed. For Dawkins, a meme was simply an idea. And ideas, like genes, can spread or they can die out. They can mutate or they can stay the same. So in the original idea, a whole lot of things could count as memes, songs, recipes, the custom of saying bless you when someone sneezes, or the idea that the earth is flat, even the idea of God. These are all memes, swimming around and competing in what Dawkins would call the meme pool.

Obviously, all these things existed before Dawkins came up with that word. One of my favorite examples starts in a shipyard in Massachusetts with a guy named James J. Kilroy. There are tons of different versions of this story, but generally, the most agreed upon one begins during World War II when Kilroy was working as a ship inspector. When he finished inspecting a ship, he would mark it with the words Kilroy was here, you know, to show that he was finished. And those ships that he marked would get sent into battle, and those words would go with them. And then, next to the words, a cartoon Kilroy began popping up all over.

in various countries. And it was more or less the same every time. It was a doodle of a man with googly eyes and a long, dopey nose, kind of a smattering of hairs on a bald head, peeking over a fence. Always, next to this cartoon dude, where the words, Kilroy was here. Pretty much anywhere the Allied soldiers showed up, Kilroy did too. So memes existed way before Richard Dawkins hit the scene.

he just gave them a name. In the Dawkins sense, a meme is just an idea. It's not the strictly speaking internet type of meme that we think of it now. So a Dawkins meme could be the idea that the earth revolves around the sun. And that's not an internet meme, right? The idea that the earth revolves around the sun is a very boring internet meme. It's not very good as an internet meme. Like, it doesn't come with a fun video.

It doesn't come with a dance. It doesn't come with an image. There are no cats. There are no cats. There's no, like, you know, like weird Photoshop text on top of an image. There's no sort of like stylized thing. Okay, so it's not the best internet meme. But the way that Dawkins originally meant meme, just as an idea, heliocentrism definitely is a meme.

And a very successful one at that. So why do we associate that word with stuff that we do online? For a long time, meme just wasn't a word that a lot of people were using. It was a made-up term in a book about evolution, published in the 70s, pre-internet, pre-Twitter. And Selfish Gene was a popular book, but it was still a relatively specific group of people who were exposed to that word. What you see in a lot of sort of meme histories is omitting this link. They go from Dawkins directly to the internet meme sense. And I've always found this kind of unsatisfying because it's like, how did this concept in social science research suddenly become the name of an internet cultural phenomenon?

Like, where did that? How did it cross over? It crossed over thanks to a guy named Mike Godwin. He's a lawyer and a writer who works on a lot of internety issues. And in the 90s, he noticed this trend happening in conversations in various corners of the internet. people kept making really gratuitous comparisons to the Nazis. So, like, say, the pizza shows up and it's, like, kind of cold and slimy and not very good, and then someone would say, we're being treated like concentration camp victims. That kind of thing. So Godwin wrote an article about this whole phenomenon of people making bad Nazi comparisons,

and he published it in the tech magazine, Wired. And he called the phenomenon a meme. an idea that spread. So this is a reminder that not all memes are good and funny and lighthearted. Bad ideas can be memes too. So as far as we know, that's the first time that the word meme kind of crossed into the internet. Godwin plucked up this word meme, this tiny kernel from a more than 300-page book about evolutionary biology. And he plopped it into this entirely new ecosystem, the internet.

I really wish that I could tell you the exact Big Bang moment for memes as we know them online. It's impossible to pinpoint the precise moment. But maybe this song rings a bell. Remember the dancing baby? CGI, bald, wearing nothing but a diaper, grooming to a Swedish rock song. The dancing baby, sometimes known as Baby Chacha, is widely. cited as one of the first internet memes to really make the rounds, booging its way into email inboxes everywhere. And people started playing around with Dancing Baby. There was a drunk

dancing baby. Dancing Baby became a kind of recurring hallucination on the TV show Allie McBeal. And someone even made a version of the baby that was dancing to Gangnam style. Don't worry, not going to play that song again. Memes have changed. a lot since the dancing baby, but the internet is still where we primarily use the word today. Usually to talk about pictures of cats eating cheeseburgers or distracted boyfriends. And internet memes are great. They are so fun. They provide an excellent distraction when you're pretending to work but are actually just kind of goofing around online.

But when we use that word meme, we're actually talking about something so much bigger. Memes are ideas. They're our culture. And that makes them as fundamental to our humanity as our genes, which might sound super weird to someone not familiar with the Richard Dawkins origin story. And hey, that is the best part of the story, how the word meme itself has spread and evolved over the decades since Dawkins coined it. In a recent anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins wrote about how the word itself seems to have caught on. The word meme, he wrote, seems to be turning out to be a good meme. Science Diction is written and produced by me, Johada Mayer, with production and editing help from Ella Fetter. Our senior editor is Christopher and Taliyata, and we had additional story editing from Nathan Toby.

Our theme song and most of our music are by Daniel Peters Schmidt, and additional music credits are on our website. Fact-checking help from Michelle Harris. For more stories like these, subscribe to Science Diction wherever you get your podcasts. Special thanks to Gretchen McCulloch. For more word nerdery in your life, check out her book, Because Internet, and her podcast, Lingthusiasm. Thanks also to the entire Science Friday staff. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you next time with a new episode and a new word.