memetiky

Memetics is the study of memes and their transmission within cultures. In memetic theory, a meme is a unit of cultural information—such as an idea, behavior, tune, or fashion—that spreads from person to person through imitation and social learning. Memes are thought to replicate, mutate, and compete for attention, producing cultural variation much like genes in biological evolution.

Originating with Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976), memetics treats memes as cultural replicators that vary in fidelity, fecundity, and longevity. The concepts of meme, memeplex (a coordinated cluster of memes), and the view that culture evolves through differential replication have guided much discussion about how ideas spread, change, and persist in societies.

Transmission occurs through various channels, including family, education, media, and online networks. The rapid spread of internet memes has popularized notions of virality, imitation, and social influence, though scholars emphasize that cultural transmission is shaped by cognition, social structure, and context as well as by the content itself.

Memetics has attracted both adoption and criticism. Supporters see it as a useful heuristic for analyzing cultural evolution and information propagation. Critics question the empirical status of memes as well-defined replicators and point to methodological challenges, measurement difficulties, and alternative explanations offered by cultural evolution theories such as dual inheritance theory. In many languages, including Czech, the field is referred to as memetika or memetiky, reflecting its interdisciplinary reach across anthropology, psychology, biology, and communications.