![]() ![]() The new soup is the soup of human culture.”ĭawkins needed a noun to describe this concept of the transmission of an idea. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind. “I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet,” Dawkins writes. “Culture.”īut what does culture have to do with evolutionary biology? Like genes, he argues, cultural transmission creates a pathway to evolution. “Most of what is unusual about man can be summed up in one word,” writes the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. ![]() Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and sign up for our newsletter.Īn evolutionary biologist blended the ancient Greek word mimeme-meaning something imitated-with the English word gene, to set the stage for LOLcats, Success Kid, Rickrolling, and so, so much more. Science Diction is a bite-sized podcast about words-and the science stories behind them.
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