What is a meme? Those gifs with the silly captions, sure, but they're also a term for units of culture and learned behavior that can be transmitted from one person to another. Like a catchy song, or a religion, or a Trope.
Memetics
is the study of the transmission of information and culture based on analogy with Darwinian evolution. The term "meme" as a discrete unit of culture was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, where he speculated that memes might act similarly to genes.
A meme's primary goal is propagation, and thus it drives its host to replicate it by teaching it to other people. In most cases it promotes propagation by carrying information useful to the host, such as a behavior or technique that proves advantageous, but some memes encourage propagation at the expense of their host's health. Such memetic viruses could turn into plagues that cause countless deaths among both carriers and those who resist adopting the meme. Dawkins, an outspoken atheist, considers many religions to be memetic viruses.
Some have criticized the idea of the meme as too reductive, or take issue with the idea of religion as a virus. Though as analogies go that disregards the fact that genes do not act isolated from their environment or other genes so why would the same be true for memes? Or the fact that viruses reach equilibrium with their hosts given enough evolutionary time.
Multiple memes can become entangled into a grouping called a "meme-complex" or "memeplex", supporting and reinforcing each other to improve their individual chances of replication. They are analogous to the supergenes of chromosome segments but are even more prone to mutation by dropping or adopting new memes into the complex. I.e. Catholicism adopting pagan gods as saints to increase its' appeal but Puritanism branching off by purging itself of pagan influences.
Some social scientists have attempted to not only study memes passively, but engage in memetic engineering. Marketing and advertising professionals, as well as government propagandists, have long engaged in a form of memetic engineering (in much the same way that animal breeders perform genetic engineering), but only recently have they started to study the underlying principles of memetics and incorporate them into their work.
It is worth noting that in real life memetics' validity as a science is EXTREMELY controversial. Do take what you read here with a grain of salt. Of course, learning things you don't have to take with a grain of salt is what that other wiki is for in the first place.
See Memetics in Fiction for when a work makes reference to this field.
Not to be confused with Memetic Mutation; "internet memes" do count as memes in this sense of the word, but Memetics refers to something far more broad than just them. In fact, you could say that memes as a concept have gone through Memetic Mutation themselves over the last few decades.
