the meme machine - s. blackmore, r. dawkins (oxford, 1999) ww

[...]... nature of the memes themselves, the tricks they exploit, the ways they group together and the general processes of memetic evolution that favour some memes over others These have not previously been studied by psychology and are an important aspect of memetics Putting together all these reasons we may be able to see why some memes succeed and others fail; why certain stories take off while others are... 12 THE MEME MACHINE than can survive The ones that live do so because they are better adapted to the environment in which they find themselves They then pass on their characteristics to their offspring and so it goes on The environment itself is constantly changing because of all these developments, and so the process is never static Algorithms must always produce the same result if they start from the. .. metameme (71) are all listed in the ‘Memetic Lexicon’ at http://www.luxifer.com/virus/memlex.html #MEME (the numbers in parentheses count the mentions of each word on the Web on my sampling day) Culturgenbased equivalents would be more obvious but less snappy Or the success of meme against culturgen may have been initially just a non-Darwinian matter of chance – memetic drift (85) – followed by a self-reinforcing... back to the basics of evolutionary theory 20 THE MEME MACHINE Imagine two memes, one ‘send a scratchcard to x’ and another ‘win lots of money’ The former instruction is unlikely to be obeyed just on its own The latter is tempting but includes no instruction on how to Together, and with some other suitable co-memes, the two can apparently get people to obey – and copy the whole package on again The essence... categories First, there is the nature of human beings as imitators and selectors From the memetic point of view the human being (with its clever thinking brain) acts both as the replicating machinery, and as the selective environment for the memes Psychology can help us understand why and how this operates There are the properties of our sensory systems that make some memes obvious and others not, the mechanisms... that 16 THE MEME MACHINE allow some memes to grab the available processing capacity, the nature of human memory that determines which memes will be successfully remembered, and the limitations of our capacity to imitate We can, and will, apply this to understanding the fate of memes but it is more properly the domain of psychology and physiology than memetics The other kinds of reasons concern the nature... how they follow from memetic theory I may speculate and even, at times, leap wildly beyond the evidence, but as long as the speculations can be tested then they can be helpful In the end, the success or failure of these predictions will decide whether memes are just a meaningless metaphor or the grand new unifying theory we need to understand human nature CHAPTER 2 Universal Darwinism Darwin’s theory... some memeticists, including perhaps Dr Blackmore, might have wished For me, the original mission of the meme was negative The word was introduced at the end of a book which otherwise must have seemed entirely devoted to extolling the selfish gene as the be-all and endall of evolution, the fundamental unit of selection, the entity in the hierarchy of life which all adaptations could be said to benefit There... taking on the idea of the selfish gene Instead of thinking of our ideas as our 8 THE MEME MACHINE own creations, and as working for us, we have to think of them as autonomous selfish memes, working only to get themselves copied We humans, because of our powers of imitation, have become just the physical ‘hosts’ needed for the memes to get around This is how the world looks from a meme s eye view’ Meme. .. struggle between the two memes (or culturgens), and it is not totally silly to ask why one of them was so much more successful Perhaps it is because meme is a monosyllable similar to gene, which therefore lends itself to quasi-genetic sub-coinings: meme pool (352), memotype (58), memeticist (163), memeoid (or memoid) (28), retromeme (14), population memetics (41), meme complex (494), memetic engineering . thank the Perrott-Warwick Fund for their financial support for the research on sleep paralysis and the paranormal discussions in Chapter 14. Without all this help, these particular memes would. Meme . There are separate Web pages on ‘Memetics’, ‘Memes’, The C Memetic Nexus’, Meme theorists is on the Web’, Meme of the week’, Meme Central’, ‘Arkaut s Meme Workshop’, ‘Some pointers and. inside our brain; a ‘me’ who sees the world, makes the decisions, directs the actions and has responsibility for them. As we shall see later, this view has to be wrong. Whatever the brain is doing