Richard Semon

Richard Wolfgang Semon (22 August 1859, Berlin – 27 December 1918, Munich) was a German zoologist and evolutionary biologist, who believed in the inheritance of acquired characters and applied this to social evolution.

Semon proposed psycho-physiological parallelism according to which every psychological state corresponds to alterations in the nerves. His ideas of the mneme (based on the Greek goddess, Mneme, the muse of memory) were developed early in the 20th century. The mneme represented the memory of an external-to-internal experience. The resulting "mnemic trace" (or "engram") would be revived when an element resembling a component of the original complex of stimuli was encountered. Semon’s mnemic principle was based upon how stimuli produce a "permanent record, . . . written or engraved on the irritable substance," i.e. upon cellular material energistically predisposed to such inscription (Semon 1921, p. 24).

Semon found evidence in the way that different parts of the body relate to each other involuntarily, such as "reflex spasms, co-movements, sensory radiations," to infer distribution of "engraphic influence." He also took inventive recourse to phonography, the "mneme machine," to explain the uneven distribution and revival of engrams.

Semon's book Die Mneme directly influenced the Mnemosyne-project of the idiosyncratic art historian Aby Warburg. Richard Dawkins's concept of a cultural unit of cultural replication which he called the meme (Dawkins, 1976), though self-attributed, is similar to to Semon’s idea of more than half a century earlier.

He committed suicide wrapped in a German flag allegedly because he was depressed by Germany's defeat after World War I.

Sources

• Christian Goeschel (2009). Suicide in Nazi Germany. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-953256-7.
• Semon, R. (1921). The Mneme. London: George Allen & Unwin.
• Schacter, Daniel (2001). Forgotten Ideas, Neglected Pioneers: Richard Semon and the Story of Memory. Philadelphia: Psychology Press. ISBN 1-84169-052-X.
• Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press.