The Meme Machine by Susan J. Blackmore

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.

Over a decade ago, Richard Dawkins, who contributes a foreword to this book, coined the term "meme" for a unit of culture that is transmitted via imitation and naturally "selected" by popularity or longevity. Dawkins used memes to show that the theory known as Universal Darwinism, according to which "all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities," applies to more than just genes. Now, building on his ideas, psychologist Blackmore contends that memes can account for many forms of human behavior that do not obviously serve the "selfish gene." For example, a possible gene-meme co-evolution among early humans could have selected for true altruism among humans: people who help others (whether or not they are related) can influence them and thus spread their memes. Meme transmission would also explain some thorny problems in sociobiology. From a gene's point of view, celibacy, birth control and adoption are horrible mistakes. From a meme's point of view, they are a gold mine. Few or no children free up the meme-carrier to devote more energy to horizontal transmission to non-relatives (monks and nuns the world over figured that out long ago), something the gene is incapable of. With adoption, memes can even co-opt vertical transmission between generations. 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 cogentAif not wholly persuasiveAcase for the concept of memes and for the importance of their effects on human culture.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Richard Dawkins gave us ``memes,'' the cultural analogue of genes; Blackmore gives us memes in spadeshumans as meme machines. For Dawkins (who writes a foreword to this volume), the meme is a metaphor for the ideas, myths, customs, works of art and science that are passed along in human cultures as unitary and competing entities. In Blackmores formulation, they have become real and serve as an explanatory tool par excellence. Selfish memes, like selfish genes, are interested in their own perpetuation and so, in tail-wagging-the-dog fashion, have guided natural selection (via genes) to favor big brains, development of language, religion, sexual selection, altruism, urbanization, etc. The operation that makes all this memetic evolution possible is the human ability to imitate. In some ways, it's entertaining to follow Blackmore's train of thoughteven anticipating how she can shape memes to show why we like to gossip or why we love sex. She's a good writer, and her enthusiasm is infectious (like the memes themselves, which she and other memeticists liken to viruses). But in the end, one is left with reasonable questions: Is that all there is to life? Where is the proof? In many instances, the ``evidence'' is speculative or laid out as a predictive proposal. The author, a lecturer in the School of Psychiatry at the University of the West in England, even denies the existence of ``self''hence the title. But, clearly, not everything humans do or think comes by way of imitation. Humans are products of variation and chance, mutations, climate, disasters, and moments of opportunity. To counter all this by saying that there are more memes ``out there'' competing for a place in human brains borders on the magical or mystical. So, enjoy the imaginative leaps and some pithy summaries of current theories and controversies regarding human evolution, but don't substitute the meme bathwater for the gene baby just yet. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.