Richard Semon

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

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 energetically predisposed to such inscription.

[5][6] 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."

David Hull, a philosopher of biology, argued that meme and mneme are parallel concepts of which Dawkins inadvertently provided the first development of since Semon.

In 1918 in Munich, shortly after the end of World War I, Semon committed suicide wrapped in a German Imperial flag allegedly because he was depressed by Germany's defeat.