The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore

The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore

Original Title: The Meme Machine ISBN: 019286212X ISBN13: 9780192862129 Autor: Susan Blackmore/Richard Dawkins (Goodreads Author) (Foreword) Rating: 4.5 of 5 stars (3712) counts Original Format: Paperback, 288 pages

Download Format: PDF, TXT, ePub, iBook. Published: May 16th 2000 / by Oxford University Press / (first published April 8th 1999) Language: English Genre(s): Science- 155 users Nonfiction- 94 users Philosophy- 32 users Biology >Evolution- 23 users

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.

About Author:

Susan Jane Blackmore is a freelance writer, lecturer and broadcaster, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth. She has a degree in psychology and physiology from Oxford University (1973) and a PhD in parapsychology from the University of Surrey (1980). Her research interests include memes, evolutionary theory, consciousness, and meditation. She practices Zen and campaigns for drug legalization. Sue Blackmore no longer works on the paranormal. She writes for several magazines and newspapers, blogs for the Guardian newspaper and Psychology Today, and is a frequent contributor and presenter on radio and television. She is author of over sixty academic articles, about fifty book contributions, and many book reviews. Her books include Dying to Live (on near-death experiences, 1993), In Search of the Light (autobiography, 1996),Test Your Psychic Powers (with Adam Hart-Davis, 1997), The Meme Machine (1999, now translated into 13 other languages), Consciousness: An Introduction (a textbook 2003), Conversations on Consciousness (2005) and Ten Zen Questions (2009).

Other Editions:

- The Meme Machine (Hardcover)

- The Meme Machine (Popular Science)

- La macchina dei memi: Perché i geni non bastano (Paperback)

- The Meme Machine (Popular Science)

- The Meme Machine

Books By Author:

- Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think about the Brain, Free Will, and What It Means to Be Human

- Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction

- Consciousness: An Introduction

- Zen and the Art of Consciousness

- Ten Zen Questions

Books In The Series: Related Books On Our Site:

- Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme

- Freedom Evolves

- The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene

- God, the Devil, and Darwin: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory

- The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation

- What Have You Changed Your Mind About?: Today's Leading Minds Rethink Everything

- Science & Human Values

- How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then And Now

- Sex, Drugs and DNA: Science's Taboos Confronted

- The Problem Of The Soul Two Visions Of Mind And How To Reconcile Them

- The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

- Dawkins vs Gould: Survival of the Fittest

- Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul

Rewiews:

Mar 20, 2008

Trevor Rated it: liked it Shelves: psychology, philosophy, social-theory If you want to criticise a book you can’t go too far wrong if you call it ‘reductionist’. As Steven Weinberg points out in his book, Dreams of a Final Theory it is odd that people should think that reductionism is the perfect one word put down for a theory – given how incredibly successful reductionism has proven in Physics. My problem is when a theory that might work quite well at one level of explanation is expanded to include other levels of explanation that do not have the same necessity beh If you want to criticise a book you can’t go too far wrong if you call it ‘reductionist’. As Steven Weinberg points out in his book, Dreams of a Final Theory it is odd that people should think that reductionism is the perfect one word put down for a theory – given how incredibly successful reductionism has proven in Physics. My problem is when a theory that might work quite well at one level of explanation is expanded to include other levels of explanation that do not have the same necessity behind them. Take Natural Selection as a case in point. How do we get from single celled organisms to elephants? That is an interesting question and one that is more or less fully answered by natural selection. This is such an incredibly successful answer that only those with their fingers in their ears screaming out ‘I’m not listening’ are unable to avoid it. But its success can also be a problem too. Time for a random image. Imagine you are falling from a plane and you have a parachute which you are going to open when you are a safe distance above the ocean, but not too soon so you miss out on the fun fall. So, you are just going to pull the cord when the ocean is a safe distance under you – right? Well, no. The problem is that the ocean is a fractal – it is identical or rather looks identical on every scale. So, all the way down the ocean actually looks exactly as it does at every other height. It might look the same, but the difference between 10,000 feet and ten feet will become very much more apparent to you if you haven’t opened your parachute before one rather than the other. Not all scales are the same, not all theories work at all scales, even if they look pretty much the same to the casual observer. Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene is one of those seminal books that many people have read and loved. I’ve read it, but didn’t really love it. Like Gould I had a problem with the idea that we are more or less machines fulfilling the wants and needs of our genes. Our genes are ‘replicators’ – things that want to make lots of copies of themselves – and we are forced by them to do stuff to make sure they get replicated. I can accept that this is partly true, although only partly, for as with Gould I don’t think genes are the right scale for an explanation of this kind. It is not genes that have sex, but organisms – and organisms are made up of many, many genes, not just one. At the very end of his book Dawkins comes up with the idea that culture seems to be spread in a way that is analogous to his idea of the spread of genes. The counterpart of the gene in culture is something he calls the meme (rhymes with dream). Blackmore takes this idea and goes a bit mad with it. She is a Buddhist, and that is important too, I think. I believe Buddhism is the religion of choice of many people who know nothing about it – you know, people who say things like, “Well, if I had to be religious I think I would be a Buddhist”. Personally, I would rather be a solipsist, but

that might just be me. (Sorry, my attempt at subtle humour) Memes can be songs, ideas like e=mc2 or nursery rhymes. They are always things that get into your head and are hard to get back out again. Blackmore says there is only a certain amount of space in our heads, so there is competition for that space and successful memes are those that win out in the battle for that space. So, House is watched by millions, but some other show is not watched at all. Blackmore’s argument becomes an extreme version of Dawkins’s argument in The Selfish Gene. In the end she concludes that we are just a collection of memes, a memeplex, and our ‘self’ is an illusion created as much by these memes working together as anything else. This is pretty much straight Buddhism – 99% of everything we do is directed at the self, and there isn’t one. This negation of the self is seen by Blackmore as a liberation. I really like the idea of memes – I love it as a metaphor and I think it has much to say about how we live and learn in the world. But it is only a metaphor. Stretching it beyond this is pure (and not very helpful) reductionism. Culture is not Darwinian – you might be able to get it into that straightjacket for a time, but force is what is needed to keep it there. Anyway, just because natural selection is wonderfully successful at explaining elephants is no reason why it should explain circuses. This is dull reductionism – not illuminating reductionism. As Searle says somewhere, if your theory makes you say something that is clearly silly, it might be time to look seriously at your theory. Saying ‘there is no self’ is a big statement – you are either going to have to really go out of your way to justify it, or really you shouldn’t be saying stuff like that in the first place. I really don’t think memetics will ever be a science of culture – but it will always be an interesting prism to glance through. 14 likes 6 comments