Dawkins believes cultural memes have mutated into internet memes

Biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term 'meme'

His 1976 book "The Selfish Gene" proposed that units of culture could be replicated, passed on, and evolve as they were transmitted, similar to human genes. He called this unit a "meme," to be pronounced like "cream."

Memes are 'ready-made language'

Internet memes—groups of texts with shared core content, medium, and stance—are what we, as creators and consumers, make of them. Through their seemingly innocuous and irreverent design, these "bite-sized" transmissions have become vehicles of misinformation, conspiracy, propaganda, activism, and subversive messaging.

Social media algorithms are shaping real-life language through memes

The evolution of the internet in the early 2000s supercharged the creation and spread of memetic content. Now, highly tuned algorithms on platforms like TikTok and YouTube influence the language, phrasing, and content of creators, which shapes how we use language in the real world.

Before Dawkins, other biologists proposed the power of mutating ideas

Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod proposed, “Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role.”

Articulating weird memes

Some memes eschew established formats and references, creating new variants that resonate with scrollers through strange meta-jokes or compositions. This episode of this podcast, geared toward blind netizens, dives into some of the weird memes being shared online, such as one in which a pigeon sitting on a shoddy excuse for a nest, single egg forgotten, is meant to inspire comfort in those whose efforts have fallen short.

'Birds Aren't Real' parodies the way memes traffic conspiracy theories

Peter McIndoe claims the US government killed 12 billion birds only to replace them with drones. These statements have powered protests—and McIndoe's fictional campaign that highlights how conspiracies and their theorists are treated.

Three examples of how humans are still evolving

For much of nature, natural selection and "survival of the fittest" still play a dominant role; only the strongest can survive in the wild. As little as a few hundred years ago, the same was true for humans, but what about now?

How Chuck Norris 'Facts' gave birth to the modern meme

In the early 2000s, anonymous, absurdly hyperbolic jokes about one B-level action star suddenly appeared everywhere on the internet. "Chuck Norris Facts" were spawned by a high school senior, who'd noticed something funny online and taken it to the next level. As Ryan Hockensmith shows in this detailed history, Spector's joke laid the groundwork for the modern meme.

Pareidolia: the cognitive bias of finding meaning in randomness

Many people equate "random" with "well-spaced," creating a cognitive bias that influences how people interpret events. This article explains how people tend to assume a generative force behind the patterns produced by randomness. This phenomenon, known as pareidolia, is seen in claims ranging from backward messages hidden in reversed audio recordings to tea leaf readings.

3-parent baby technique fuels worries of future 'designer babies'

Some critics of this approach worry that any genetic manipulation will both culturally and technologically normalize the idea of "designer babies"—embryos that are manipulated or selected based on physiological characteristics including height, eye color, athletic ability, and intelligence.

Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency—a form of digital currency with a wide variety of uses—created around popular 'memes,' or viral internet jokes.

Diffusion models generate nontext media by adding and removing noise from a dataset

Unlike text-based AI tools, which rely on large language models to recognize patterns in text, diffusion models use a reward system to generate images, video, audio, and 3D models. They can also be customized to match a user’s style.

The human cost of creating medieval monsters

The concept and creation of monsters have been used since time immemorial to communicate social norms and the consequences of breaking them. Some so-called monsters were judged as such solely due to having features that would be considered birth defects in modern times. This in-depth article explores the human cost of creating medieval monsters, many of whom were defined by a physical appearance that deviates from the expected.

If aliens visited Earth, it seems unlikely they'd be evolved biological creatures like us

The writer behind Mindless Algorithm, George McGowan, challenges various assumptions about aliens depicted in science fiction. One of those is that aliens are, like humans, individual entities that live, age, and die. McGowan suggests that the difficulty of intergalactic travel and the aliens' technological advancements make it more likely that they'd be an advanced form of AI or digital copies of biological entities.

Computational and biological systems share fundamental principles, like randomness

Proposed by Alan Turing and John von Neumann, the concept originates from how DNA and computers run by executing encoded instructions in parallel. The advent of AI and the temperature parameter has seen neural networks mimic the randomness of protein encoding.

David Attenborough discusses creationism and his position as an agnostic

Attenborough argues that accounts of humanity's origins from different cultures cannot all be correct because they often differ, whereas geological records are consistent worldwide, meaning science provides the best understanding of the natural world. However, he acknowledges that, just as insects lack awareness of human goings-on, humans may be unaware of the existence of a deity.

Some Pokémon have been named after real and fictional organisms, while some real-world species have been named after Pokémon, such as Chilicola charizard and Binburrum zapdos.

Critic Neil Postman argued modern technology is dystopian

Cultural critic Neil Postman argued in 1985's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" that mass media had made the dystopia of Huxley's "Brave New World" a reality. In 1992, he published "Technopoly," a wider critique of the utopian visions of technology or, as Postman calls it, "all of the machinery that takes people out of public arenas and keeps them fixed in their homes."

In 2015, a custom virus program was used to destroy and transform art images

At the Art Laboratory Berlin's "bOdy pandemOnium: Immersion into Noise" exhibit, Chicago-born artist Joseph Nechvatal explored viractualism—the interface between the biological and the technological—via a custom virus program that randomly altered images representing the human eye and rectum.

Fruit fly experiments helped identify genes responsible for major body development

The insects' fast life cycle and affordability have allowed geneticists to quickly identify which genes are responsible for limbs, eyes, and other body structures by inducing mutations. The same genes may be responsible for different parts of a species' body, such as limb-building genes being responsible for wing pigmentation in butterflies.

There are lots of weird ideas about dinosaur extinction, like hungry, hungry caterpillars

One of the great historical puzzles is this: why did the dinosaurs go extinct? Whether an asteroid, poison plants, volcanos and climate change, or something else, it's still a mystery. Scientists have been debating this question for almost a hundred years. One insect scholar suggests that caterpillars are the culprits.

Why don't we all have cancer?

The creation of a single cell produces 120,000 genetic mutations that can lead to cancer. This video investigates how our bodies proofread and autocorrect those mistakes.

An explanation distinguishing the butterfly effect from causality, necessity, and sufficiency

In pop culture, the analogy has conveyed the impression that the flapping of a butterfly's wings has a cascading effect that directly produces a tornado somewhere else on Earth. However, butterfly-wing flapping alone is insufficient to cause tornadoes, as the complexity of atmospheric systems requires many more conditions to produce them, any of which can be the tipping point to initiate tornadogenesis.

Burning Man’s countercultural messages have influenced Silicon Valley’s work culture

Burning Man is famous for attracting tech leaders like the CEOs of Tesla, Meta, and Google. Some experts believe the festival's ethos and principles of participation, communal effort and radical inclusion have given rise to Silicon Valley's communal work culture.

Some Pokémon have been named after real and fictional organisms, while some real-world species have been named after Pokémon, such as Chilicola charizard and Binburrum zapdos.

Stonehenge has produced wild origin stories

Built before the wheel was invented, Stonehenge inspired increasingly fantastical explanations—from a 12th-century tale of Merlin and Nephilim giants to 1960s claims that aliens built it alongside the pyramids.

How microchips are made

Our increasingly electronic world depends on tiny devices called microchips to function. It takes half a year to create one, which is approximately the size of a fingernail. Engineering them is a highly involved process that starts with silicon-rich sand and eventually turns into billions of transistors packed into one small area. Watch this video to understand the complex feat of creating microchips and how they’re relevant to our daily life.

Indefinite cloning of some endangered species may not sustain their longevity because cloning success rates decrease as genetic mutations accumulate.

Crows are believed to have intelligence on par with a seven-year-old child and demonstrate complex behaviors, from problem-solving with tools to recognizing human faces.

The history of many kitchen appliances involves unexpected discoveries and applications, including wartime radar turned hamster defroster and replacing an 'ice king' with heat-stealing boxes.

Visualize how CRISPR-Cas9—a type of immune system used by single-celled organisms to attack invasive viruses—targets and makes precise changes to a gene's DNA.

When you complete a CAPTCHA on a website to prove you are human, you may be unknowingly training algorithms for self-driving cars, whose systems require training data to help identify crosswalks, bicycles, and other outdoor objects.

While atoms are normally made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, exotic ones have been built with antimatter—alternate versions of normal matter that live for fractions of a second and are about a billion times as rare.

Learn how your body is, scientifically, like a firework with its own slow, controlled burn.

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

After NASA's Voyager 1 captured Earth as a single pixel as it left the solar system in 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan used the image to reflect on humanity's fragility and the responsibility to protect 'the only world we've ever known.'

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

Chaos theory—informally known as the butterfly effect—is the reason why weather forecasts are presented with probabilities rather than certainties.

Fear or disgust related to clusters of holes and cracks, called trypophobia, may stem from evolutionary processes to help us avoid pathogens.

A 2019 Facebook event called on attendees to "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," resulting in countless memes, the creation of a music festival, and eventually the arrests of those who did try to approach the area.

In 2019, a laptop loaded with six of the worst malware in history and described as 'an exhibit of historical weaponry' sold for $1.3M.

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

Budweiser stores yeast derived from the original 1800s strain in a secret bunker, which only the Head of Yeast Management can access—not even the CEO

In 2018, 26-year-old missionary John Allen Chau was killed by tribesmen after attempting to reach and evangelize on India's isolated North Sentinel Island

Children are now three times more likely to say they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up than an astronaut, with some even attending 'YouTube camps' that teach kids how to create content for the platform.

For centuries, Niagara Falls has been a magnet for daredevils seeking to conquer one of nature's most powerful wonders, with its 200-foot drop and water rushing at 32 feet per second with 280 tons of force.

Graffiti dates back to at least ancient Pompeii, where citizens scrawled messages to one another on public walls

Salvador Dalí believed he was his own dead brother, who had died nine months before he was born

Exploring the Larry Bird punch that almost changed March Madness

The word 'jazz' evolved from 'jasm,' 19th-century American slang for 'energy'