The Meme Machine

By: Susan Blackmore, Richard Dawkins - foreword

Narrated by: Esther Wane

Length: 11 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's summary

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

Essential reading on Evolution

An essential read for anyone interested in evolution. My question to Susan would be - "Was it necessary to inject your destroy-the-self-meme meme at the end?"

Rigorously thought out and argued

Her conclusions really seem unarguable, and the implications could not be more profound. Presented with kindness and sympathy for the resistance one might feel towards her ideas. Ends up being quite comforting really.

simultaneously illuminating as well as confusing

close to Richard Dawkins style of thinking and writing.
takes some of his ideas further.
loved it.

Not sure how much I agree with. But it does make I think about what really goes on inside.

British accent of narrator may not appeal

I normally like listening to books where narrators have British accents.

This book is an exception.

It reached a point that I shuddered every time I heard the word EEEEE-volution.

Deep and well argued

This is a deep and well argued conceptualization of memes. It is a great starting point for further thought.

memes are gut bacteria, not godlike puppet masters

there are a few things that really bug me about this book. but i suppose they are all just intellectual disagreements. we do see imitation in other animals, such as chimpanzees bashing nuts with stones. this meager start of "imitation" does not then give way to a new all powerful replicator that brings the species into dominance, it is a meme, but it is stagnant.
i suspect the root issue is that me and the author disagree about the primary selection pressures on humans. to me, memes in humans have become a dominant force because we are a very rare large eusocial species. eusociality causes communication to become much more complex and abstract. it is when memes are added to this situation, with the addition of large brain size and selection for constant "memetic warfare", that human memes evolve.
additionally, humans do have another brand of replicator, they are the bacteria in the gut. but these bacteria do not control us like a dog on a leash, the only reason they are allowed to exist is because our body has figured out how to regulate them so that on average they benefit our fitness. the exact same almost certainly takes place in our brains. we should be studying the brains immune defenses from memes, rather than a complete subservience as implied by this book.
finally for such a speculative field, i feel more attention should have been placed on real examples. the evolution of science, religions, cultures, computer science. (online dna can be translated into a virus, so you can "catch" diseases over the internet. and memes can be turned into viruses as well, showing these are one and the same).
but i suppose strong disagreement on the fundamentals is still to be expected at this point

I'm a mf meme machine

I have never felt more up-to-date on meme then I am right now. praise the meme!

Voice

Narrator is too British and Woman. British woman. She's bri'ish innit? The british are notoriously the narration of all time.

Narrator kinda killed the book

Never has this been an issue for me in any of the audiobooks i own. I always thought of it as a petty critique that many point out in otherwise great books. This one is unbearable though. Apologies to the narrator but honestly it feels Luke it's being read by a text to speech software. completely monotonical throughout the entire listen. Will trade for another after 30mins in. Writing it to save others from the hassle.

Insightful but incomplete

This had some interesting thoughts, but I felt like Blackmore never quite defined what a meme was in her usage, and her apology for not quite defining it was not quite satisfactory. She also didn't clearly show how memes are truly independent of genes, because I don't think they are, and a lot of what she ascribed to memes could just be complex neurology and biology dependent on genes. If memes are a new separate replicator, how are they different from, say, human bodies, which also replicate? Biologists would say that genes make human bodies in order to make more genes, but Blackmore didn't clearly demonstrate why memes aren't also the creation of genes for making more genes.

I appreciated her discussion at the end about Self. It's an important discussion, and I think she's on the right track. I'm not sure I love her conclusion about how to live in light of the absence of self, but she's probably logically consistent there. If there's no self and no suffering, there's no enjoying. Ergo, nihilism. Food for thought.