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. He is known for coining the terms engram and ecphory.

Before taking up his appointment at the University of Jena, he spent three years travelling around Australia;^[1] and the Indonesian Archipelago and, as a consequence, he was one of a number of influential German-speaking residents — such as Ludwig Becker, Hermann Beckler, William Blandowski, Amalie Dietrich, Wilhelm Haacke, Diedrich Henne, Gerard Krefft, Johann Luehmann, Johann Menge, Carl Mücke (a.k.a. Muecke), Ludwig Preiss, Carl Ludwig Christian Rümker (a.k.a. Ruemker), Moritz Richard Schomburgk, Karl Theodor Staiger, George Ulrich, Eugene von Guérard, Robert von Lendenfeld, Ferdinand von Mueller, Georg von Neumayer, and Carl Wilhelmi — who brought their "epistemic traditions" to Australia, and not only became "deeply entangled with the Australian colonial project", but also were "intricately involved in imagining, knowing and shaping colonial Australia" (Barrett, et al., 2018, p. 2).^[2]

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 energetically predisposed to such inscription.^[3] According to historian Petteri Pietikainen:

Semon argued not only that information is encoded into memory and that there are 'memory traces' (engrams) or after-effects of stimulation that conserve the changes in the nervous system, he also contended that these changes in the brain (that is, engrams) are inherited. Semon's mneme-theory fell into disrepute largely because in a Lamarckian fashion it proposed that memory units are passed from one generation to another.^[4]

Semon was a proponent of the theory of organic memory, which was popular amongst biologists and psychologists from 1870 to 1918. The theory later lost scientific legitimacy as it yielded no reliable data and advances in genetics made the theory untenable.^[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." He also took inventive recourse to phonography, the "mneme machine," to explain the uneven distribution and revival of engrams.

Semon's book, Die Mneme, influenced the Mnemosyne project of the idiosyncratic art historian Aby Warburg.^[7] N.B.: Semon's Mneme should not be confused with meme, a separate concept coined by Richard Dawkins.^[8] Despite Dawkins having coined 'meme' distinctly from mneme, that has not stopped Dawkins' contemporaries from comparing the concepts for being remarkably similar. 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.^[9] Nevertheless, the two concepts are not often discussed together.

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.^[10]

Semon is commemorated in the scientific name of a species of green-blooded skink (Prasinohaema semoni),^[11] and an Acantocephalan (Australiformis semoni).^[12]