Selfish Jean

The idea comes from the book The Selfish Gene. ""Selfish", when applied to genes, doesn't mean "selfish" at all. It means, instead, an extremely important quality for which there is no good word in the English language: "the quality of being copied by a Darwinian selection process." The final chapter of the first edition introduced the idea of the meme, a culturally-transmitted entity such as a hummable tune, by analogy to genetic transmission.