The Meme Machine

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xx THE MEME MACHINE Adam Hart-Davis, Euan MacPhail, Nick Rose, and my editor Michael Rodgers who has given me much sound advice and encouragement. Helena Cronin helped enormously by inviting me to lecture on memes and putting me in touch with many helpful critics. Finally I would like to thank the Perrott-Warwick Fund for their financial support for the research on sleep paralysis and the paranormal discussions in Chapter 14. Without all this help, these particular memes would never have come together. Bristol October 1998 SJB
CHAPTER 1 Strange Creatures We humans are strange creatures. <strong>The</strong>re is no doubt that our bodies evolved by natural selection just as other animals’ did. Yet we differ from all other creatures in many ways. For a start we speak. We believe ourselves to be the most intelligent species on the planet. We are extraordinarily widespread and extremely versatile in our ways of making a living. We wage wars, believe in religions, bury our dead and get embarrassed about sex. We watch television, drive cars and eat ice cream. We have had such a devastating impact upon the ecosystems of our planet that we appear to be in danger of destroying everything on which our lives depend. One of the problems of being a human is that it is rather hard to look at humans with an unprejudiced eye. On the one hand, we are obviously animals comparable with any others. We have lungs, hearts and brains made of living cells; we eat and breathe and reproduce. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection can successfully explain how we, along with the rest of life on this planet, came to be here, and why we all share so many characteristics. On the other hand, we behave quite differently from other animals. Now that biology has so successfully explained much of our similarity with other creatures we need to ask the opposite question. What makes us so different? Could it be our superior intelligence, our consciousness, our language, or what? A common answer is that we are simply more intelligent than any other species. Yet the notion of intelligence is extremely slippery, with interminable arguments about how to define it, how to measure it, and to what extent it is inherited. Research in artificial intelligence (AI) has provided some nice surprises for those who thought they knew what makes human intelligence so special. In the early days of AI, researchers thought that if they could teach a computer to play chess they would have reproduced one of the highest forms of human intelligence. In those days the idea that a computer could ever play well, let alone beat a Grand Master, was unthinkable. Yet now most home computers come with passable chess programmes already installed, and in 1997 the program Deep Blue beat World Champion Garry Kasparov, ending unquestioned
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Page 4 and 5: Foreword by Richard Dawkins As an u
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CHAPTER 7 The origins of language W
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98 THE MEME MACHINE So how and why
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CHAPTER 9 The limits of sociobiolog
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CHAPTER 11 Sex in the modern world
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138 THE MEME MACHINE Celibacy We ca
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CHAPTER 13 The altruism trick In to
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CHAPTER 16 Into the Internet In our
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248 THE MEME MACHINE Psychology, (e
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The Meme Machine

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