34 Quotes by Susan Blackmore

For the planet’s sake, I hope we have bird flu or some other thing that will reduce the population, because otherwise we’re doomed.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That’s not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator.

Take male strategies for success in the world. If you’ve got all the advantages, if you’re attractive and clever and all of that, you will generally go for very high quality females.

If you found a mammal with feathers, then you’d know that Darwin was wrong. Well, it’s rather the same with memes.

Just like genes, the memes have no foresight. They cannot be expected to foresee that almost anything might happen. They might even, in the process of diverting our energies from the genes, just wipe us out.

Memes, like genes, are selected against the background of other memes in the meme pool. The result is that gangs of mutually compatible memes – coadapted meme complexes or memeplexes – are found cohabiting in individual brains. This is not because selection has chosen them as a group, but because each separate member of the group tends to be favoured when its environment happens to be dominated by the others.

If we take memetics seriously then the ‘me’ that could do the choosing is itself a memetic construct: a fluid and ever-changing group of memes installed in a complicated meme machine.