The Meme Machine (Popular Science)

The Meme Machine (Popular Science)

By: Susan Blackmore  

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Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5

Here, Blackmore boldly asserts: "Just as the design of our bodies can be understood only in terms of natural selection, so the design of our minds can be understood only in terms of memetic selection." Indeed, The Meme Machine shows that once our distant ancestors acquired the crucial ability to imitate, a second kind of natural selection began: a survival of the fittest among competing ideas and behaviors. Those 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 brilliantly explains 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, and our very sense of "self", this provocative book will be must reading any general reader or student interested in psychology, biology, or anthropology.

Description:
In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins proposed the concept of the meme as a unit of culture, spread by imitation. Now Dawkins himself says of Susan Blackmore:

Showing greater courage and intellectual chutzpah than I have ever aspired to, she deploys her memetic forces in a brave--do not think foolhardy until you have read it--assault on the deepest questions of all: What is a self? What am I? Where am I? ... Any theory deserves to be given its best shot, and that is what Susan Blackmore has given the theory of the meme.

Blackmore is a parapsychologist who rejects the paranormal, a skeptical investigator of near-death experiences, and a practitioner of Zen. Her explanation of the science of the meme (memetics) is rigorously Darwinian. Because she is a careful thinker (though by no means dull or conventional), the reader ends up with a good idea of what memetics explains well and what it doesn't, and with many ideas about how it can be tested--the very hallmark of an excellent science book. Blackmore's discussion of the "memeplexes" of religion and of the self are sure to be controversial, but she is (as Dawkins says) enormously honest and brave to make a connection between scientific ideas and how one should live one's life. --Mary Ellen Curtin

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
The memeplex has you - In fact, it is you if Blackmore's ideas reflect reality, as the self is a very questionable and slippery thing, probably illusory, whereas the continual chatter that goes on in most of our heads must consist of a soup of parasitic replicators that sneak in via televisions and newspapers and hijack our neural circuitry to force us to make more televisions and newspapers.

I had a bit of an internal fight over how to rate this book, at one point thinking it would merit a neutral three stars. By the time I had finished, Blackmore had swayed me. I am not claiming to be a convert, but some of the ideas are so compelling that I think they really have a chance. There were also a couple of ancillary thoughts so arresting that I laughed out loud at the sudden switch of perspective. Try this for size: "Pyper concludes that 'Dawkins himself has become a survival machine for the Bible, a meme nest for its dispersed memes that may induce readers who would otherwise leave their Bibles unread to go back to the text.'" Now that's a nasty-sounding case of parasitism arising among memes!

Blackmore speaks of the sudden and unique explosion of human brain size and culture in terms of a co-evolutionary feedback loop driven by memes. This sounds very plausible to me, but I was left a bit short of a concept of how to test it. Human brain size certainly seems to need a special explanation. Large brains are energy-expensive and dangerous in childbirth and take an outrageously long childhood to fill up. Lions and wolves and Velociraptors got along fine for aeons with more modest kit. So why the exception in our case? Memes seem like a plausible trigger, once a threshold is passed where they can replicate.

Blackmore devotes some space to religion, and here again she seems to be onto something. She reports that near-death experiences tend to be very similar in all cultures where they have been reported - and of course that there has never been a case of a person meeting a deity from another religion of whom he had not heard prior to the event. Ever. If you meet St. Peter, then you came from a culture that had a Saint Peter. It's all in your head. Or rather, since the advent of human culture, it's in the meme pool and on the pages of "holy" books and just happens to be parasitising your head because it has proven effective at making you proselytise. Religions are, on this view, a particularly virulent infective memeplex with unusual power for making people record them and pass them on.

I was left a bit unsure as to whether memes defeat the problem, known since Darwin and later found to be irrelevant with the discovery of DNA, of blending inheritance, for instance by being digital and thus capable of Mendelian-style recombination rather than progressive dilution. On the other hand, they definitely seem to be evolving to reproduce with fecundity, fidelity and longevity, as Dawkins suggested that replicators must do. The internet has led to an explosion of informational fecundity in the form of mails, spam and viruses. "Time-capsules" and ancient palimpsests demonstrate longevity, the memetic equivalent of the tardigrade tun. Fidelity in an age of print and digital copying is near perfection. If this is a metaphor, it is a compelling one.

At the end of the day, and the book, I am not sure whether memes really provide a strong theoretical basis for new understanding. The idea, however, is charming and persuasive. Blackmore leaves us with a thought as to how to improve our own lives, mostly trapped in the thicket of the tangled memory bank of the memes and deafened by the hum of memetic competition for our mental processing time: Just be. Quietly watch the mind and achieve what we karate folk call "zanshin" - quiet awareness. We have increasingly become the slaves of this infernal mental noise, whether it is a set of independent informational parasites or just too much media dross. We could use some inner quiet, and Blackmore reminds us of that. Serve your own peace; not the selfish replicators.

Customer Review: 3 out of 5
In Search of Unicorns - Blackmore's book rests on an interesting conceit: what if, in addition to DNA, there was another independent replicator that could ensure copies of itself got passed forward through time? Even more interesting, what if this replicator was ideas, and the host was the human brain? What would the implications be? This is the kind of thing you might ask a clever undergraduate to write an essay about, to see how far they could take the analogy before it broke down completely. Blackmore, however, takes the whole thing very seriously and this leads her to stretch and distort each line of argument in turn rather than make a contribution to intellectual clarity. Trying to prove her thesis that memes are real and important, she is forced to make spurious distinctions and accept huge areas of intentional vagueness and the result is profoundly unsatisfying. A clever undergraduate would use better sleight-of-hand to disguise the flaws, and a more objective writer would detect the core problems early on and admit them openly. As it is, Blackmore stumbles around, trying to demonstrate the correctness of her thinking but all the while showing the contrary.

As these are quite damning statements, this review will take the trouble to point out the various major flaws in The Meme Machine.

The fundamental analogy, between memes and genes, is spurious because genes only get passed on if the proteins they encode are useful to the organism. Selection pressure therefore works at the level of the product, not at the level of the thing. What are the products of memes that would similarly be subject to selection pressure? Unless they confer some advantage to the organism, the answer must be: nothing. And thus the entire edifice, constructed on a very unsound analogy, breaks down. Minor details like the absence of copy correction mechanisms and hence the striking lack of fidelity between the original and the replication are merely additions to the compendium of reasons why memes are in fact completely unlike genes, and therefore the core argument of the book is fallacious. Either a thing does replicate, or it does not (and not only are Blackmore's brief sentences on genes wrong, but she also seems not to understand how they work. It is not "a long way" from a protein to brown eyes. It is a very straight line indeed). One cannot be "a little pregnant" and one cannot be "a little replicative." The idea that memes seed themselves in our brains like plants seed themselves in soil is superficially amusing but, on closer inspection, turns out to be completely misleading.

To promote her thesis Blackmore is willing to accept that the definition of memes can be very vague, for example passing on "the gist" of a story; but then she insists that primates that learn from one another to wash potatoes or fish for termites with sticks aren't really learning by imitation at all. But which imitation has greater fidelity? Passing on "the gist" of a tale, or imitating quite closely another primate's actions? Moreover, it's simply implausible to think that humans alone have made an enormous cognitive stride. This would be akin to the development of speech when all other primates are entirely mute, unable to make any type of vocalization at all. Or akin to walking upright when all other primates lacked even the ability to crawl. In fact if imitation is so important in humans we should expect to see the beginnings of the trait in other primates. Blackmore's argument that only humans can imitate is unnecessary to her central thesis, and the obvious flaws in this part of her chain of reason serve only to undermine the reader's confidence in her other assertions.

Blackmore's question, "why do we think all the time" is likewise flawed. She imagines that not thinking would confer a modest energy advantage for the organism in comparison to its peers that could not stop thinking. So, memes must exist because we do seem to be thinking all the time. But this argument is flawed in several different ways. For a start, it's not obvious that everyone does in fact think all the time. Not only are we very unreliable reporters of our own experiences, as experiments have demonstrated beyond doubt and so we may in fact go for some time without thinking, but be unaware of it. Moreover, there is a clear advantage to constant thinking: any social animal that can outwit its fellows will gain advantage. Therefore thought can indeed confer advantage and when we consider the nature of most of our flitting darting thoughts they turn out, not surprisingly, to be revolving around aspects of our personal lives. We create scenarios in our minds and sometimes those scenarios help us gain some modest concrete advantage in the physical world. Such a results-based explanation seems much more adequate than the notion that our brains have been commandeered by memes through some undisclosed ghostly mechanism. And even more tellingly, when we examine our thoughts we don't find flocks of memes buzzing about; we find we're thinking about aspects of our lives that matter to us. This is the precise opposite of what her thesis would indicate, but Blackmore doesn't seem to notice.

By page 66, Blackmore has explicitly abandoned the analogy with genes, prompting this reader to ask, "then why introduce the analogy at all?" She opts for a definition of meme that seems to be anything and nothing, vague and indeterminate, able to be shaped to fit the needs of the moment but without rigor of any kind and thus effectively useless. Worse, she then proceeds to demonstrate how the idea of memes is totally unnecessary to explain the rapid growth in the size of the human brain - without realizing that she is doing it. She correctly shows that as inventions build on each other and proliferate, thus giving rise to ever-greater opportunities for learning-by-imitation, selection pressure will operate to favor those humans who can learn faster and with greater fidelity. But this is standard evolutionary theory, and the moment Blackmore tries to suggest that memes are somehow independent of the process, her exposition collapses under the unnecessary weight of pointless addition. All available data shows that women select the best available male they can realistically aspire to. And what does best mean? Again, the data shows it means either actual power and wealth or traits that suggest the bearer will shortly acquire power and wealth. To the best of my knowledge, no woman has ever left her partner because he modified his Flock of Seagulls haircut or took out his earring. But millions of women have in fact abandoned their mates when their power or wealth became significantly diminished. So the idea that transient fashion is a powerful mediator in sexual selection is, to put it charitably, misleading. Teenage girls fall for teenage boys who follow some trend because that trend is a proxy for something else. For example, the wearing of male earrings briefly became fashionable in some parts of the West only because certain wealthy and famous men began to do it; by imitating the fashion a million teenage boys were signaling that they had sufficient resources to squander on something intrinsically useless and simultaneously that they had the aspiration to be wealthy and famous themselves. It was not the earring per se that was attractive but the signal it sent - that the wearer aspires to better things and will probably exert some effort to attain them. Blackmore seems not to grasp this vital distinction between signal and underlying message, and thus goes totally astray in her comments on memes as drivers of sexual selection. Indeed, her "examples" of men who were able to attract multiple mates despite being physically unattractive are all wealthy and powerful men - precisely what evolutionary theory would suggest, and nothing whatsoever to do with memes.

Likewise her argument that people have fewer children because memes want more of their time for self-propagation. If this were true, people would be spreading memes much of the time - but in fact they do not, unless by meme one accepts virtually any utterance at all. If Blackmore was able to provide a rigorous definition of meme, we could test for its appearance - but she dodges the question early on and avoids it thereafter, because any rigorous definition would bring her entire edifice tumbling down immediately. In fact, people in developed countries have fewer children but the vast majority of those children reach adulthood - in contrast with people in poorer countries, who must have many children in order to ensure that one or two make it all the way to reproductive age. In a developed country it makes genetic sense to have few children but to lavish resources on them so that they can, in turn, attract high-quality mates and pass on high-quality genes. In poor countries it's basically just a lottery, so you want lots of entries. But Blackmore doesn't grasp this at all.

Her discussion of altruism is equally interesting. She quotes research that demonstrates the importance for social animals to have a reputation for fairness and being willing to exchange items of value such as food. Then she completely forgets this, and claims that non-kin altruism must demonstrate the existence of memes. In fact, non-kin altruism is simply a signal to the group that the individual is worthy of trust and therefore increases their probability of being on the receiving end of sharing by others. Of course in modern societies this doesn't work because the group is too vast, but it would have worked very well in the small hunter-gatherer groups where humans evolved. And, as she notes earlier, our behaviors haven't had time to adapt to modern society so we still act in ways appropriate to our past environment. Blackmore's book is absolutely riddled with this kind of error, and in the end the cumulative effect of such wilful blindness becomes quite tiresome.

So Blackmore's book is basically about unicorns. Being convinced of the existence of unicorns, she attempts to assemble "evidence" about their influence on the world. To do this, she co-opts data that actually shows sociobiology is our fullest and most predictive theory so far, and tries to convince us that actually it supports the existence of unicorns. A reader who knows little about evolutionary psychology or sociobiology will benefit from the book because, to her great credit, Blackmore provides a potted overview that is reasonably comprehensive and reasonably accurate. But at no point does she ever provide any serious evidence for the existence of her particular unicorn, the still-elusive meme.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Wow. Is nothing sacred anymore? - First Copernicus tells us we are not the center of the universe, then Darwin tells us we are animals shaped by an indifferent environment, and now Susan Blackmore argues that our conscious human selves are merely illusions? The old anthropocentric models of existence continue to take a pounding in this book. The reader can judge whether that is a good thing or not, but Blackmore makes a compelling case in the final chapter that it is.

The book starts out defending the concept of the meme with an appeal to `Universal Darwinism' (anytime there are replicators subject to `mutation' and selective pressures, evolution must proceed). She then attempts to explain some of the mysteries of human evolution (such as our large brains and use of language) with an appeal to memetics. This constitutes an interesting new viewpoint, but some things she attributes to memetic evolution look a lot like standard genetic sexual selection to me. She is on more solid (and traditional) ground in her subsequent discussion of some emphatically held religious, ideological, and new age beliefs from a 'memes eye view'.

Where the book really comes together is in the chapter on our human concept of `self' (consciousness) as a powerful memeplex. Much of what she wrote before began to make far more sense when viewed in that light (I would almost recommend reading it first). The concept is very counter intuitive, but she does a commendable job of helping you `see' it. If true, it certainly explains a lot about our behaviour as a species. Thought provoking stuff indeed.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Overwhelmingly thought provoking - Wow, this book gives one a lot about which to contemplate! Ms Blackmore has written a number of works on mind and consciousness, and she certainly puts the whole concept of memes and their activity into this framework with remarkable success and productivity.

I found her clarification of the meme--what it is, how it propagates and evolves--very helpful. She certainly seems to have given a great deal of consideration to the issues that arise by virtue of muddy definitions and by an over reliance on metaphor and simile with biology and genetic evolution in describing the phenomenon. It is this attention to the basics that has the possibility of creating a useful, testable paradigm and a science, and I suspect it is ultimately by this nascent science that the topic of consciousness will ultimately be more completely resolved.

While I'm not entirely convinced that the "I" of "me" is merely the outcome of a complex of memes that have taken over a carbon based entity for its own benefit, neither am I entirely sure that she hasn't at least gotten a hold of some essential thread that might unravel the process of what actually is involved in consciousness and our perception of a central "I" in "me." The simple statement made by other authors of the topic that consciousness is an "emergent property of complexity," seems to beg the question. Certainly the latter approach leaves very little to actually test any more than "God did it" does. God may well have done it, but since this is not testable, it is a moot point and not one for science but for philosophy and metaphysics. Modern techniques of medical imaging have made vast strides into the function of the human brain, but little has been done scientifically about consciousness because so far there has been no theory that might put possibilities to the test.

Although the author's knowledge of physical anthropology is a little behind--probably because the book is itself a little old--the concept of a meme complex bringing about the technological revolution seems entirely possible. Even the underlying genetics might actually be right. That the mere collection of cultural assemblages by humans and their ancestors may have brought about the consciousness we so much value also seems not impossible; certainly the amount of mental juggling that the production, use, and social integration of this technology must have required might well have done so--even if one does have to point to it as a source of the "complexity" from which the "property" of consciousness might have "emerged."

An amazing book.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Good Book to Introduce Memes - You should read this book if you want an introduction to the science of memes.

Susan Blackmore does a very good job of introducing the concept of memes, discussing some of the development of the science and providing discussion and examples of how memes work and how they influence behavior. This is a far better book than Brodie's "Virus of the Mind", which is also an introduction to memes but lacking the depth of Blackmore's book. Many other reviewers have discussed memes in their reviews, so I will not do so here. Suffice it to say that memes are replicators, like genes, only memes represent the passing on of "anything that can be imitated". Memes are very powerful, and can offset the drive of our genes (Dawkin's "Selfish Gene" concept). Memes can be simple or come in packages, called meme complexes, or "memeplexes"; religion is a common example of a memeplex.

One nice feature of the book is that Blackmore does provide context for the development of the concept of memes - she references many other scientists and psychologists and provides some history around the development of our understanding of the mind, consciousness, genetics and so on, thus providing a small survey of the development of memetic science. I do not think a reader has to necessarily be familiar with other authors or have read Dawkins, Dennett and so on, but it would be helpful to understand the selfish gene concept prior to reading the book, although Blackmore references this idea and it is an easy concept to understand.

The authorship of the book is very good, with sufficient end and footnotes to make it an accessible, yet properly researched discussion of a relatively recent scientific theory. The book does not include a lot of formal scientific material demonstrating the existence of memes or how they work. Still, a good introduction to the subject.

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