What is "memetic algorithm"

n. An algorithm for the evolution of genotypes, which includes a selected, non-genetic component.

Memetic algorithms (MA) represent one of the recent growing areas of research in evolutionary computation. The term MA is now widely used as a synergy of evolutionary or any population-based approach with separate individual learning or local improvement procedures for problem search. Quite often, MA are also referred to in the literature as Baldwinian evolutionary algorithms (EA), Lamarckian EAs, cultural algorithms, or genetic local search.