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The Meme Machine

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The Meme Machine

By: Susan Blackmore, Richard Dawkins - foreword
Narrated by: Esther Wane
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About this listen

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.

©1999 Susan Blackmore; foreword copyright 1999 by Richard Dawkins (P)2019 Tantor Anthropology Biology Developmental Psychology Evolution Social Sciences Sociology Genetics

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How the ape got his big brain...

Should have been a Nobel prize, but it's just a book. The evolution of altruism, the development of our inordinately enormous cranial cavities, Susan draws research from everywhere to weave a cohesive and comprehensive theory for it all and ties it in an elegant bow. This memeplex is most grateful.

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