Overview

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.

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Richard Dawkins, an acclaimed biologist, is a fellow of the Royal Society and was the inaugural holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He is the author of numerous books, including The Selfish Gene, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, The Ancestor's Tale, The God Delusion, and The Greatest Show on Earth. He has received a number of honorary doctorates from colleges and universities around the world and has received many awards and honors throughout his career, most notably a Finlay Innovation Award, the Michael Faraday Award, the Nakayama Prize, the Kistler Prize, and the Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest. Richard Dawkins, an acclaimed biologist, is a fellow of the Royal Society and was the inaugural holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He is the author of numerous books, including The Selfish Gene, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, The Ancestor's Tale, The God Delusion, and The Greatest Show on Earth. He has received a number of honorary doctorates from colleges and universities around the world and has received many awards and honors throughout his career, most notably a Finlay Innovation Award, the Michael Faraday Award, the Nakayama Prize, the Kistler Prize, and the Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest. Esther Wane is a British actor and voice-over artist. After a career in finance, she fulfilled a childhood dream of going to drama school in London, and her life as an actor began at age forty. She has a lifelong passion for literature and can often be found browsing bookshops during any spare moments. Wane enjoys taking her listeners on a journeys in time and space and bringing the characters on the page to life in their imagination. She lives with her family and collection of books in Hertfordshire, just outside London. Susan Blackmore is a psychologist, TED lecturer, and writer researching consciousness, memes, meditation, and anomalous experiences, and is visiting professor in psychology at the University of Plymouth. Her book The Meme Machine has been translated into sixteen languages; more recent books include Zen and the Art of Consciousness and Seeing Myself: The New Science of Out-of-BodyExperiences.

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