The Meme Machine
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Description
What is a meme? First coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene , a meme is any idea, behavior, or skill that can be transferred from one person to another by imitation: stories, fashions, inventions, recipes, songs, ways of plowing a field or throwing a baseball or making a sculpture. The meme is also one of the most important--and controversial--concepts to emerge since The Origin of the Species appeared nearly 150 years ago.In The Meme Machine Susan Blackmore boldly asserts: "Just as the design of our bodies can be understood only in terms of natural selection, so the design of our minds can be understood only in terms of memetic selection." Indeed, Blackmore shows that once our distant ancestors acquired the crucial ability to imitate, a second kind of natural selection began, a survival of the fittest amongst competing ideas and behaviors. Ideas and behaviors that proved most adaptive--making tools, for example, or using language--survived and flourished, replicating themselves in as many minds as possible. These memes then passed themselves on from generation to generation by helping to ensure that the genes of those who acquired them also survived and reproduced. Applying this theory to many aspects of human life, Blackmore offers brilliant explanations for why we live in cities, why we talk so much, why we can't stop thinking, why we behave altruistically, how we choose our mates, and much more.
With controversial implications for our religious beliefs, our free will, our very sense of "self," The Meme Machine offers a provocative theory everyone will soon be talking about.
Reviews
"The Meme Machine is an entertaining, scholarly, adventurous book that would interest most evolutionary biologists. It presents a radical new vision of the human condition in which we are unconscious hosts to ideas that evolved to serve their own reproductive needs, not ours. Blackmore articulates that vision with intellectual bravado and imagination."--The Quarterly Review of Biology
"Well-written and personable, this provocative book makes a cognent...case for the concept of memes and for the importance of their effects on human culture." --Publishers Weekly
"Blackmore expounds this theory in a very literate style, with examples and anecdotes that are vivid, informative, and sometimes downright charming. This is one of the rare popular science books that presents a new theory in lay terms while also postulating original ideas worthy of scholarly debate. Its publication is a sure sign that the science of memetics has come of age."--Library Journal
"The meme called "meme" has not gone away--It has slowly replicated in various brains ever since and Blackmoore has been one of its principal victims. In her remarkable book, The Meme Machine , she takes Dawkins's throwaway idea, and imaginatively explores it to the full."--Matt Ridley, TLS
"An informed effort to popularize the theory that cultures are controlled by replicating units (memes) analagous to the genes of biological theory, and that their operations drive cultural evolution."--New York Times Book Review
About the Author(s)
Susan Blackmore is a Lecturer in the School of Psychology, University of the West of England. The author of Dying to Live: Science and the Near Death Experience, she resides in Bristol, UK.
