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A review by remusrimbu
The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore
2.0
I should first explain what memetics is before the actual review: memetics tries to be a theory of human culture that explains cultural evolution by analogy with genetic evolution, with memes(ideas that can be imitated) playing the role of genes.
There are lots of interesting points here but overall the theory of memetics is most likely a dead end. Memes are at most a useful metaphor from genes but few anthropologists believe memetics can be a unified theory of human culture. As proof of this, The Journal of Memetics was shut down in 2005 if I remember correctly and even the author has sort of disowned her own theory and now does other things.
There are two main problems with memetics: one is the fact that not only it is very hard to rigorously define and operationalize what a meme actually is, but even more than this no one has been able to find a neural substrate for a meme. The next step of such a theory would be to show how a meme is stored in the brain neurologically. This is at the moment impossible.
More importantly, most of this book is speculation and just-so storytelling of the sort that evolutionary psychology did a lot in the 1990s'. The author assumes that memes are a thing and that they evolve by natural selection, and then finds examples of elements of human culture, human life and anthropology that would confirm such a view. In some places she makes some predictions based on memetics but most turn out to be wrong. For example, she predicts that if the Internet is produced by memes it would always be free of charge in order to support the viral spread of ideas, whereas if humans controlled it they would most likely monetize it. This might have seemed likely in the 90s' but we are moving more and more towards monetization so this falsifies the memetic view. There are many examples like this.
Where the theory shines is in giving a new spin to Buddhist ideas of the self being an illusion constructed by our thoughts, which are just memes trying to get copied and imitated into other minds. This is either brilliant or irrelevant. I am undecided as to how much memetics contributes to a scientific theory of the self; it may turn out to be superfluous in the sense of us being able to describe identification with thoughts and the self as illusiory without needing thoughts to be conceptualized as memes.
The ideas in the book are definitely out of date in current science as memetics has been dead for a while, and therefore it becomes difficult to recommend this book to anyone. It contains many thought-provoking ideas though, which is why I decided to give it two stars.
There are lots of interesting points here but overall the theory of memetics is most likely a dead end. Memes are at most a useful metaphor from genes but few anthropologists believe memetics can be a unified theory of human culture. As proof of this, The Journal of Memetics was shut down in 2005 if I remember correctly and even the author has sort of disowned her own theory and now does other things.
There are two main problems with memetics: one is the fact that not only it is very hard to rigorously define and operationalize what a meme actually is, but even more than this no one has been able to find a neural substrate for a meme. The next step of such a theory would be to show how a meme is stored in the brain neurologically. This is at the moment impossible.
More importantly, most of this book is speculation and just-so storytelling of the sort that evolutionary psychology did a lot in the 1990s'. The author assumes that memes are a thing and that they evolve by natural selection, and then finds examples of elements of human culture, human life and anthropology that would confirm such a view. In some places she makes some predictions based on memetics but most turn out to be wrong. For example, she predicts that if the Internet is produced by memes it would always be free of charge in order to support the viral spread of ideas, whereas if humans controlled it they would most likely monetize it. This might have seemed likely in the 90s' but we are moving more and more towards monetization so this falsifies the memetic view. There are many examples like this.
Where the theory shines is in giving a new spin to Buddhist ideas of the self being an illusion constructed by our thoughts, which are just memes trying to get copied and imitated into other minds. This is either brilliant or irrelevant. I am undecided as to how much memetics contributes to a scientific theory of the self; it may turn out to be superfluous in the sense of us being able to describe identification with thoughts and the self as illusiory without needing thoughts to be conceptualized as memes.
The ideas in the book are definitely out of date in current science as memetics has been dead for a while, and therefore it becomes difficult to recommend this book to anyone. It contains many thought-provoking ideas though, which is why I decided to give it two stars.