The Copying Instinct

From Pompeii’s mysterious Sator Square to Richard Dawkins’s 1976 coinage, one pattern spreads-and we ask why.

[Speaker 1]: There is a specific Latin phrase that shows up all over the ancient world. [Speaker 2]: It’s a five-word square. Sator, Arepo, Tenet, Opera, Rotas. [Speaker 1]: You can read it top-to-bottom, left-to-right, even backwards. It’s a palindrome. [Speaker 2]: And people were obsessed with it. We found it scratched into plaster in Pompeii, which was buried in 79 AD. But then it turns up centuries later in England, in Syria, in churches, on amulets. [Speaker 1]: Nobody knows exactly what it means, right? [Speaker 2]: The translation is disputed. But that didn't stop people from copying it. They scratched it into walls because the pattern was satisfying. It felt important. It was something you could replicate, recognize, and pass on. [Speaker 1]: Most of us talk about memes like they were born online. Like they belong to the era of Reddit and TikTok. But that basic behavior-copying a recognizable pattern just because it wants to be copied? That might be far older than the internet. [Speaker 2]: By the end of this, you’ll know where the word "meme" actually came from, why the "first meme" depends entirely on your definition, and what actually makes a meme a meme. [Speaker 1]: So what was the first one? A Latin square in 79 AD? Or a dancing 3D baby in 1996? [Speaker 2]: To answer that, we have to look at how the word "meme" didn't start as an internet joke-it started as a biology analogy in 1976. And that origin changes how you see everything that came after. [Speaker 1]: It’s Wednesday January 14, 2026, and you’re listening to The Angle. [Speaker 2]: So, let’s start with that human impulse. We are copying machines. [Speaker 1]: Right. Long before we had "Send to All," we had walls. [Speaker 2]: Exactly. And we had swords and shields. You look at history, and you see these little packets of culture that travel way further than they should. Like the Sator Square we mentioned. [Speaker 1]: Which is essentially a viral image, just carved in stone. [Speaker 2]: It’s a viral structure. The research digest notes that its obscurity might have actually helped it travel. It looked magical. It was easy to scratch. So it spread. [Speaker 1]: Jump forward to World War II. You have American soldiers moving across Europe and the Pacific. And everywhere they went, they left the same doodle. [Speaker 2]: "Kilroy Was Here." It’s a little drawing of a bald guy with a big nose peeking over a wall. [Speaker 1]: And this wasn't official propaganda. [Speaker 2]: No, that’s the key. It was bottom-up. It’s commonly attributed to a shipyard inspector named James J. Kilroy, who marked rivets he’d checked. But the soldiers turned it into a massive inside joke. [Speaker 1]: It was a signal. "I was here, I’m part of this group, I know the code." [Speaker 2]: And it proved that a simple form-a doodle and a phrase-could survive millions of hand-drawn copies. It was durable. [Speaker 1]: So the behavior is ancient. But we didn't have a name for it until the 1970s. [Speaker 2]: Right. 1976. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins publishes a book called The Selfish Gene. [Speaker 1]: Which is a book about biology. Not culture. [Speaker 2]: Mostly. But he needed a way to explain how culture evolves. He argued that just like genes replicate by jumping from body to body, ideas replicate by leaping from brain to brain. [Speaker 1]: So he needed a word that sounded like "gene." [Speaker 2]: He took the Greek word…