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Term defined by Richard Dawkins. Put simply a meme is a unit of information regarded as being analogous to genes.
A contagious information pattern that replicates by symbiotically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern. An idea or information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, to repeat it to someone else. All transmitted knowledge is memetic. (Wheelis, quoted in Hofstadter.)