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The Meme Machine

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The Meme Machine

Written 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 Biological Sciences Psychology Social Sciences Sociology Genetics Physical Exercise
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A New Way to view Experience

I choose my rating to prompt others to read this. It is a great view on how memetic’s are shaping our present and future and how a very thin narrative can lead a Main Street audience simply because the western audience have their eyes on their screens more than they have taking in what life puts in front of them.

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enlightening and endlessly fascinating

The idea of a second replicator, on top of the genetic replicator, will forever change how I experience my own worldview, wonderfully written and narrated

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