Richard Semon

Life & Legacy

Richard Wolfgang Semon (22 August 1859, in Berlin – 27 December 1918, in Munich) was a German zoologist, explorer, evolutionary biologist and 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. He wrote about these ideas in his book Die Mneme (1904). He propounded the idea that organisms acquired bodily memory based on environment and experience that was imprinted in tissues and could be transmitted across generations, a form of epigenetics.