The Meme Machine - Susan Blackmore, Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins, Susan Blackmore

Category: Science

Narrator: Esther Wane

Tags: Science, Documentary, Contemporary, Adults

By Susan Blackmore, with a foreword by Richard Dawkins., 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