The Meme Machine

What is a meme? 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 making a sculpture. The meme is also one of the most important concepts to emerge in a long time. It has controversial implications for our religious beliefs, our free will, and our very sense of "self."

Long before ‘memes’ became a synonym for catchy internet videos, they were a term coined by Richard Dawkins in his classic 1976 book The Selfish Gene to describe a ‘cultural replicator’ analogous to the gene. In The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore took this side-thought and ran with it. She argues that human culture in general, as well as specific phenomena such as the origin of language and cooperation, can best be seen through a ‘meme’s eye view’ of selfish memes competing to replicate themselves. Modern cultural evolution research remains sceptical of this rather extreme perspective, often thinking more in… show more.