Here’s a polished version with spelling, grammar, and clarity improved, while keeping the original meaning intact:

The term “meme” was coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Introduced as a conceptual idea inspired by the study of genealogy, memes—or memetics—refer to the study of the ways in which ideas propagate throughout a society.

The word is derived from “mimeme,” meaning “that which is imitated,” which Dawkins shortened to “meme” to rhyme with “gene.”

Dawkins proposed that ideas are filtered through a kind of psychological natural selection process, by which groups, societies, and cultures select those ideas that have the greatest utility, are most widely understood, and/or provide a clear cultural snapshot of a particular moment in time.

Modern internet meme culture is a clear successor to Dawkins’s concept, and in many ways the internet allows memes to compete and evolve at a rate previously unimaginable even to the most forward-thinking evolutionary biologists and psychologists.