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    The Meme Machine
    The Meme Machine
    The Meme Machine
    Audiobook11 hours

    The Meme Machine

    Written by Susan Blackmore and Richard Dawkins

    Narrated by Esther Wane

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.

    Susan 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateOct 8, 2019
    ISBN9781630154011
    The Meme Machine

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    Reviews for The Meme Machine

    4/5

    215 ratings10 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The meme machine really helped me further understanding Dawkins' Meme theory-consequences. Blackmore shares her insights and ideas in a pleasant, clear way, not pretending having the answers, sharing her direction of thoughts and insights on the subject. This book made me want to go much deeper in the subject. Great!
      Note: I loved the audiobook (pleasent voice and tempo) The printed version demands a very good eyesight (impossible small printing)... which won't bother digital readers ;-)
    • 5/5
      Excellent book. Listen to the last two chapters a few times because the conclusions are profound but go quickly. Go with the flow and enjoy the ride!
    • 3/5
      What is "The Selfish Gene" to genes is "The Meme Machine" to memes. Although I buy the author's view, she fails at giving compelling examples and arguments to support her hypothesis. Several times, she has admits that she did not conduct the tests to support her hypothesis. A skeptical reader may not be convinced by the author's view.Read "The Selfish Gene" before reading this book.
    • 3/5
      Mixed thoughts on this. I think Ms. Blackmore has some good substance to her memetics theory, but there are points where she gets too fuzzy, and her explanations didn't convince me completely of its merits. She compares the replication of memes to that of genes, requiring fidelity, fecundity and longevity. I haven't bought off on their fecundity, much less the fidelity of memetic replication, but as this is not my field, I'll just keep thinking.

      It took me mulling over the whole when near the end to nail what should have been obvious to me earlier: she restricts her memetic theory to humans because, she contends, only humans can imitate. [As an aside, something like that is direly ripe for religious picking (to counter the dreaded evolutionary genetic theory). And I'm surprised it hasn't to my knowledge been picked.] I just read Frans de Waals' The Bonobo and the Atheist and I wonder if he would agree - I suspect not.

      I also think she imparts too large an impact to her theory: Evolutionary theory faced enormous opposition because it provided a view of humans that humans do not like. The same will probably be true of memetics.

      Not really. How is any of what is in this book something humans will not like? Moreover, how many people actually know anything about it? Or care? My observation above hints at no conflict with their religious thoughts on human evolution (or non-evolution.) By limiting such a theory to humans only, one shouldn't be comparing to genetics - genes are in every life in our tiny world, but memes are limited to one highly developed primate?
    • 5/5
      The one that started it all for me. I wasn't a big fan of non-fiction before reading this, but afterwards I tried to grapple evolutionary biology, sociobiology, psychology.... I'm so curious about this stuff now; I wish I could go back to school and get guidance from a professor.
    • 4/5
      I have to admit that when I first started reading this book I was taken aback, but I stuck with it and am ultimately impressed with the case that Blackmore painstakingly makes. I would highly recommend this book, especially if you have an enduring interest in human culture and religion. Even if you don't agree with her conclusions, I think her arguments are worth considering.
    • 4/5
      This book was worth the read. While in many ways it struggled with the burden of proof and lack of research into the field of memes, and as a result came across as a pseudo-scientific approach at debunking all sorts of current thinking, it is put together well and really walks the reader to the rather shocking conclusion.
    • 4/5
      A fascinating read. Would this be a meme? Blackmore makes u think about yourself and this world in ways you had not previously entertained!
    • 5/5
      An interesting look at the behavior of memes: how they replicate and propagate and make use of their human hosts.Also amusing in that it's the only book I've ever read where there's a clear authorial bias toward Zen Buddhism: Blackmore is obviously happy to conclude that memetics shows that identity is indeed an illusion.
    • 4/5
      At the start of the book Blackmore quotes Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene", saying, "All life evolves from the differential survival of replicating entities." Dawkins went on to ask if there was any other replicator that underwent selection apart from genes and suggested that there was, calling his new concept a "meme".In a general way a meme is an idea that can be written, broadcast, spoken etc. and which at some point reproduces (ie. enters someone elses mind).Similarly,as a gene can fail to reproduce and dies (eg. in a dinosaur), a meme can fail to reproduce and fades out (eg. the idea of a flat earth ).Blackmore starts from here, and explores this second replicator at some length. It soon becomes clear that memes rely on imitation and communication with a great landmark being the growth of the human ability for speech, probably followed by the printed word, and culminating in the amazing modern massive and accurate transfer of information.The effect of the spread of memes is also clear. As she says, "When the environment changes, a species that can speak, and pass on new ways of copying, can adapt faster than one that can adapt only by genetic change." In other words in an Ice Age you could make a coat rather than waiting to evolve one or you could light a fire to survive the new conditions having seen it done or having heard about it.Memetic reproduction is helping genetic reproduction in this case and it is no surprise that humanity as "advanced meme manipulators" dominate all other creatures.What is not so obvious, and which she takes some pains to point out, is that memes are replicators in their own right and are not simply a tool to facilitate genetic reproduction.Some memes reproduce better than others, and as you would expect we are surrounded by memes that have been tested successfully (eg. our technology) although she shows that a successfully reproducing meme does not necessarily have to be a truthful one.The worlds religions are memeplexes (collections of self supporting memes) that contradict each other but which have been enormously successful in establishing themselves in the human mind.Blackmore suggests that they have evolved to reproduce successfully rather like a virus and she gives a set of rules for a successful memeplex: take something unexplained, provide a myth, include a powerful force that can't be tested, add in optional coercion for non-believers, provide a future reward (also untestable) and say that all good people believe in it and that it is the TRUTH.She looks at the sociobiological view of human behaviour and concludes that "without the concept of the second replicator sociobiology must always remain impoverished". New memes fundamentally alter human behaviour as can be seen in the contrast between modern meme rich societies and the more traditional world.A further question that she only touches on but that deserved to be looked at more carefully is where this memetic reproduction and selection takes place. At present it is in the human mind but it is possible to imagine that machines could transmit and select memes themselves.We would then have a new substrate for memetic evolution with different objectives from our own, and as she says, "we might be quite excluded from their kind of cultural evolution." - a worrying prospect.