> Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist who coined the word “meme” in his classic 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, seemed bent on disowning the Interne

> Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist who coined the word “meme” in his classic 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, seemed bent on disowning the Internet variety, calling it a “hijacking” of the original term. I'd hardly call the video where he calls it "hijacking" showing him "bent on disowning the Internet variety": https://youtu.be/GFn-ixX9edg?t=4m8s https://youtu.be/GFn-ixX9edg?t=4m8s Nor his attitude to the word being "reappropriated by the internet"[1]: The meaning is not that far away from the original. It's anything that goes viral. In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of The Selfish Gene, I did actually use the metaphor of a virus. So when anybody talks about something going viral on the internet, that is exactly what a meme is and it looks as though the word has been appropriated for a subset of that. [1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/richard-dawkins-memes https://www.wired.co.uk/article/richard-dawkins-memes