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lazydoc98's review against another edition
informative
lighthearted
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
4.0
kylenorthington's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
yojimbo96's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
2.5
An interesting look at the academic concept of memes. About a third of the material went over my head because I am not a biologist or geneticist but what I could understand was interesting. I don’t agree with all the claims the author makes and some are quite out there, but it did provoke thought. I think there were times when the author strayed from memes which is what I wanted to learn about.
osmose's review against another edition
4.0
The Meme Machine had more to offer than what I was ready for; the (potential) explanatory power of memetics as theorized by Blackmore goes far beyond what I was expecting. A definitely thought-provoking read that forces you into an unfamiliar yet rich perspective on the dynamics of human behaviour. I liked how the idea of memes—as the homologue of genes but on the cultural level and coevolving along with them—provided a new way of approaching nature vs/and culture questions. Blackmore showed that memetics can nicely complement sociobiology, filling in its explanatory gaps.
I'm still unsure what I think of many of the ideas presented in the Meme Machine and how the theory will react to tentative falsification. But whatever happens to memetics, Blackmore's exploration of it will remain fascinating—a piece of originality.
I'm still unsure what I think of many of the ideas presented in the Meme Machine and how the theory will react to tentative falsification. But whatever happens to memetics, Blackmore's exploration of it will remain fascinating—a piece of originality.
rhyslindmark's review against another edition
3.0
I really wanted to like this book. And some parts of it were truly exceptional. Blackmore did a great job exploring how memes can have explanatory power for other phenomena.
But too much of it was philosophical and rambling for me. If you read, skim for the best juicy parts!
But too much of it was philosophical and rambling for me. If you read, skim for the best juicy parts!
lit_chick's review against another edition
4.0
I have to admit that when I first started reading this book I was taken aback, but I stuck with it and am ultimately impressed with the case that Blackmore painstakingly makes. I would highly recommend this book, especially if you have an enduring interest in human culture and religion. Even if you don't agree with her conclusions, I think her arguments are worth considering.
remusrimbu's review against another edition
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.
kahawa's review against another edition
3.0
This had some interesting thoughts, but I felt like Blackmore never quite defined what a meme was in her usage, and her apology for not quite defining it was not quite satisfactory. She also didn't clearly show how memes are truly independent of genes, because I don't think they are, and a lot of what she ascribed to memes could just be complex neurology and biology dependent on genes. If memes are a new separate replicator, how are they different from, say, human bodies, which also replicate? Biologists would say that genes make human bodies in order to make more genes, but Blackmore didn't clearly demonstrate why memes aren't also the creation of genes for making more genes.
I appreciated her discussion at the end about Self. It's an important discussion, and I think she's on the right track. I'm not sure I love her conclusion about how to live in light of the absence of self, but she's probably logically consistent there. If there's no self and no suffering, there's no enjoying. Ergo, nihilism. Food for thought.
I appreciated her discussion at the end about Self. It's an important discussion, and I think she's on the right track. I'm not sure I love her conclusion about how to live in light of the absence of self, but she's probably logically consistent there. If there's no self and no suffering, there's no enjoying. Ergo, nihilism. Food for thought.
jnieto's review against another edition
4.0
Slow at the start, the last sections contain brave and upsetting statements about how memes and their evolution could explain our non-stop chain of thoughts and conscience.
alexander0's review against another edition
3.0
This book takes Richard Dawkins' somewhat brief description of memetics to its logical/scientific theoretic ends within a biological framework. To a large extent this book would make sense with older biological theories of neo-Darwinian evolution, but this is not accurate anymore. The Selfish Gene, while influential and important as an idea in genetic theory, is not empirically supported. Genes are ecologies. Thus if the memetic theory still holds, so are memes.
Ultimately, this means that memes for Blackmore are not quite as analogous and causal as she assumed. Also, it means that she perhaps got a lot of things right, but with the wrong rhetorical focus. She admits memes are just communicative practices within the first 75 pages, but continues formulating them to be in line with outdated biology. For this theory to survive, she would have done better to start with Information and Communication, and argued out a critical perspective of biology instead of the other way around. It seems, although that subverts the scientific dominance of biological forces and Dawkins, it would have made her theory more accurate to biology today.
Ultimately, this means that memes for Blackmore are not quite as analogous and causal as she assumed. Also, it means that she perhaps got a lot of things right, but with the wrong rhetorical focus. She admits memes are just communicative practices within the first 75 pages, but continues formulating them to be in line with outdated biology. For this theory to survive, she would have done better to start with Information and Communication, and argued out a critical perspective of biology instead of the other way around. It seems, although that subverts the scientific dominance of biological forces and Dawkins, it would have made her theory more accurate to biology today.