Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"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
Review
"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
Review
"We are fortunate indeed to have so lucid a guide to this strange, beguiling and still emerging intellectual landscape as Susan Blackmore." Oregonian
Review
"Remarkable." Times Literary Supplement
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [247]-258) and index.
About the Author
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.
Table of Contents
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