What is a meme? First coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 study 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, and ways of plowing a field, throwing a baseball, or making a sculpture. It is also one of the most important — and controversial — concepts to emerge since Darwin's Origin of the Species.

Here, 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, The Meme Machine shows that once our distant ancestors acquired the crucial ability to imitate, a second kind of natural selection began: a survival of the fittest among competing ideas and behaviors. Those 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 brilliantly explains 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, and our very sense of "self," this provocative book will be must reading any general reader or student interested in psychology, biology, or anthropology.

"Blackmore posits that, in modern culture, meme replication has almost completely overwhelmed the glacially slow gene replication. Well written and personable, this provocative book makes a cogent — if not wholly persuasive — case for the concept of memes and for the importance of their effects on human culture." Publishers Weekly

"Blackmore, a British psychologist, 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." Library Journal

"We are fortunate indeed to have so lucid a guide to this strange, beguiling and still emerging intellectual landscape as Susan Blackmore." Oregonian

"Remarkable." Times Literary Supplement

Includes bibliographical references (p. [247]-258) and index.

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.

Foreword by Richard Dawkins

Preface

Strange creatures

Universal Darwinism

The evolution of culture

Taking the meme's eye view

Three problems with memes

The big brain

The origins of language

Meme-gene co-evolution

The limits of sociobiology

An orgasm saved my life

Sex in the modern world

A memetic theory of altruism

The altruism trick

Memes of the New Age

Religions as memeplexes

Into the Internet

The ultimate memeplex

Out of the meme race

References

Index