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From biology to culture to the new new economy, the buzzword on everyone's lips is "meme." How do animals learn things? How does human culture evolve? How does viral marketing work? The answer to these disparate questions and even to what is the nature of thought itself is, simply, the meme. For decades researchers have been convinced that memes were The Next Big Thing for the understanding of society and ourselves. But no one has so far been able to define what they are. Until now.
Here, for the first time, Robert Aunger outlines what a meme physically is, how memes originated, how they developed, and how they have made our brains into their survival systems. They are thoughts. They are parasites. They are in control. A meme is a distinct pattern of electrical charges in a node in our brains that reproduces a thousand times faster than a bacterium. Memes have found ways to leap from one brain to another. A number of them are being replicated in your brain as you read this paragraph.
In 1976 the biologist Richard Dawkins suggested that all animals -- including humans -- are puppets and that genes hold the strings. That is, we are robots serving as life support for the genes that control us. And all they want to do is replicate themselves. But then, we do lots of things that don't seem to help genes replicate. We decide not to have children, we waste our time doing dangerous things like mountain climbing, or boring things like reading, or stupid things like smoking that don't seem to help genes get copied into the next generation. We do all sorts of cultural things for reasons that don't seem to have anything to do with genes. Fashions in sports, books, clothes, ideas, politics, lifestyles come and go and give our lives meaning, so how can we be gene robots?
Dawkins recognized that something else was going on. We communicate with one another and we get ideas, and these ideas seem to have a life of their own. Maybe there was something called memes that were like thought genes. Maybe our bodies were gene robots and our minds were meme robots. That would mean that what we think is not the result of our own creativity, but rather the result of the evolutionary flow of memes as they wash through us.
What is the biological reality of an idea with a life of its own? What is a thought gene? It's a meme. And no one before Robert Aunger has established what it physically must be. This elegant, paradigm-shifting analysis identifies how memes replicate in our brains, how they evolved, and how they use artifacts like books and photographs and advertisements to get from one brain to another. Destined to inflame arguments about free will, open doors to new ways of sharing our thoughts, and provide a revolutionary explanation of consciousness, The Electric Meme will change the way each of us thinks about our minds, our cultures, and our daily choices.
- Sales Rank: #1308645 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-07-30
- Released on: 2013-07-30
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
In his defining book, The Selfish Gene, Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins sought to describe cultural evolution in biological terms with the newly coined term "meme," a metaphorical information particle that replicates itself as people exchange information, as the cultural equivalent of the gene, the replicating agent of biological evolution. Here, Cambridge anthropologist Aunger (Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science) theorizes on the nature of this so-called "thought gene." In doing so, Aunger coins a term of his own, "neuromemetics," proposing that memes are in fact self-replicating electrical charges in the nodes of our brains. The author explains that the shift in perspective from Dawkins's purely social memetics to a memetics working at the intercellular level is akin to sociobiology's view of social behavior as a genetic trait subject to evolution. This is an ambitious book on a par with Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine. Unlike the handful of pop-culture treatments out there, Aunger steers clear of the popular image of the meme as a VD-like brain parasite passed by word of mouth. That said, this book is that rare hybrid of crossover science writing that carries enough intellectual punch to warrant thoughtful peer review, and yet should appeal to those ambitious general readers who are in the market for a megadose of mind candy.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Review
Marc D. Hauser Harvard University, author of "Wild Minds" What makes "The Electric Meme" a welcome addition is that Aunger takes a serious crack at turning memetics into a more rigorous science, one that can uncover, like a microbiologist looking at a virus, both the structure and transmission of memes. Be warned, however: your memes may never be the same again.
David L. Hull Northwestern University, author of "The Metaphysics of Evolution""The Electric Meme" is not only a critical, detailed and coherent development of the meme idea, it also improves our understanding of genes, prions, computer viruses, information theory and neurophysiology as well. Aunger even asks the most fundamental question of all -- do we have memes or do our memes have us?
Terrence W. Deacon Boston University, author of "The Symbolic Species" Sometimes it can take a generation for a simple concept to be clearly articulated...This is without question the most erudite and penetrating book yet written on memes. Potentially, it heralds the beginning of a new science.
Daniel Dennett Tufts University, author of "Consciousness Explained" and "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" With this book, Robert Aunger puts memetics decisively on the intellectual map. "The Electric Meme" will eclipse the field as the inaugural book of a whole new school of social science and cultural history.
Richard Dawkins Oxford University, author of "The Selfish Gene" What more, one might ask, needed to be said about memes? The answer turns out to be plenty, and Robert Aunger says it clearly, intelligently and entertainingly.
Kevin Padian Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley With good examples and lively prose, Aunger explores the question: just how tangible are the units of cultural replication that we call memes? His far-reaching answers will surprise and stimulate readers.
Dan Sperber French National Center for Scientific Research, coauthor of "Relevance;" author of "Explaining Culture" Unlike others who write about cultural evolution, Robert Aunger has actually studied it in the field as a practicing anthropologist. He is also an accomplished evolutionary theorist. This makes him uniquely qualified to write about memes. In this clear, well-written, and challenging book, he addresses the important and difficult issues of memetics with ease, and puts forward novel ideas that are sure to stir great interest and also controversy.
"With this book, Robert Aunger puts memetics decisively on the intellectual map. "The Electric Meme" will eclipse the field as the inaugural book of a whole new school of social science and cultural history."--Daniel Dennett, Tufts University, author of Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea
"What more, one might ask, needed to be said about memes? The answer turns out to be plenty, and Robert Aunger says it clearly, intelligently and entertainingly."--Richard Dawkins, Oxford University, author of The Selfish Gene
"Sometimes it can take a generation for a simple concept to be clearly articulated...This is without question the most erudite and penetrating book yet written on memes. Potentially, it heralds the beginning of a new science."--Terrence W. Deacon, Boston University, author of The Symbolic Species
""The Electric Meme" is not only a critical, detailed and coherent development of the meme idea, it also improves our understanding of genes, prions, computer viruses, information theory and neurophysiology as well. Aunger even asks the most fundamental question of all -- do we have memes or do our memes have us?"--David L. Hull, Northwestern University, author of The Metaphysics of Evolution
"What makes "The Electric Meme" a welcome addition is that Aunger takes a serious crack at turning memetics into a more rigorous science, one that can uncover, like a microbiologist looking at a virus, both the structure and transmission of memes. Be warned, however: your memes may never be the same again."--Marc D. Hauser, Harvard University, author of Wild Minds
"With good examples and lively prose, Aunger explores the question: just how tangible are the units of cultural replication that we call memes? His far-reaching answers will surprise and stimulate readers."--Kevin Padian, Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley
"Unlike others who write about cultural evolution, Robert Aunger has actually studied it in the field as a practicing anthropologist. He is also an accomplished evolutionary theorist. This makes him uniquely qualified to write about memes. In this clear, well-written, and challenging book, he addresses the important and difficult issues of memetics with ease, and puts forward novel ideas that are sure to stir great interest and also controversy."--Dan Sperber, French National Center for Scientific Research, coauthor of Relevance; author of Explaining Culture
About the Author
Robert Aunger received his Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA. He has taught at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Cambridge. He was until recently a Research Fellow at King's College, Cambridge, and is currently affiliated with the Department of Biological Anthropology at the same university. He organized the first academic conference dedicated to memes, which resulted in his book Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science. He lives in Cambridge, England.
Most helpful customer reviews
62 of 64 people found the following review helpful.
Genesis of a real science of culture transmission
By Todd I. Stark
"Memes," the suggestion that ideas and other bits of culture can act like parasites by spreading from mind to mind without regard to the invaded host is a particularly compelling idea. It has caught on with a lot of people outside of biological science, but biologists have been generally skeptical of it. The problem has been that theories of memes did not take the characteristics of the host into consideration, and we have a strong sense from biological data that the host of transmitted information probably has to have some control over the processing of the information that they receive and transmit. The notion that our obvious strong propensity for social imitation also allows memes to enter us almost without resistance, then control us to force us to spread them seems a bit much.
Aunger has formulated the meme theory in a way that resolves these problems. He is very careful in his reasoning compared to other popular books on memes and cultural transmission. He shows why cultural transmission is important, pulling from some of the same fascinating data as cultural selectionism researchers such as Boyd and Richerson. Cultural transmission matters because culture doesn't track with environmental, ecological, or genetic patterns. He then makes the crucial distinction for a true meme theory. He distinguishes the idea of a replicator and a duplication mechanism, and builds a model of memes specifically as replicators.
Cultural selection theory holds that culture plays a role in biological evolution, but doesn't neccessarily consider bits of culture tobe composed of self-copying replicators. The reason the distinction is important, Aunger makes clear, is that if they truly can be seen in that way, then they add an additional causal force for culture to take on a life of its own to transmit itself through us. This is the causal force that other meme authors have taken for granted, and Aunger makes it explicit and potentially testable.
In building his model of memes, Aunger finds that the definition can and should be made more specific, as a kind of complex residing in the brain rather than an arbitrary collection of artifacts, behaviors, and ideas. This model of memes gets around the problem of beliefs not being truly arbitrary by making it at least possible to connect the acceptance of memes back to our evolved computational engines as described by evolutionary psychologists.
This is a very rigorous and well-considered argument that finally takes real anthropological and biological data into consideration rather than simply making vague analogies of culture patterns to infection patterns of microbes, or providing a too-facile explanation for things we don't agree with (those guys were just infected by "religion memes," but we're immunized from that.")
I think this book is a landmark in the literature of modelling the transmission of human culture, and if the empirical testing it suggests bears fruit, it may well change the way we view human belief in general and have significant implications to epistemology.
On the downside, while this book is non-technical, it is academic in tone and is unlikely to have the same popular appeal as Brodie's dramatic "Virus of the Mind" or Susan Blackmore's very provocative "Meme Machine." On the other hand, it heralds a potential start for a real science of memetics, addressing the truly important questions (such as "do we have memes or do they have us ?") which those others books attempted to answer but assumed the answer from the start rather than framing the question in empirically testable terms and a more specific definition of a meme, potentially telling us how well memes act act as true replicators.
41 of 48 people found the following review helpful.
Instigation is double-speak
By Andrew Chen
This is a great book and models something totally different from what I conceived of as a meme. In fact, it redefines memes to something potentially relevant but even more inaccessible before. It's notion of what a "meme" is winds up being a tiny little fragment of a thought, so that something like a word or a idea or a sensation wouldn't actually be a meme, but a collection of them.
My big gripe (but it isn't that big) is that when the author seeks to avoid the problems with how memes transfer between brains, he winds up saying that they don't - they merely create conditions suitable for the recreation of the meme in the other brain. From my point of view, this is double-speak - to paraphrase the book, it says something like "they're not being transferred, because there are problems with memes being transferred, but they are being transferred, but we're not calling it that". This would basically mean that memes don't really get transferred, and that there's a definite possibility of those conditions not leading to recreation of the meme in the other brain. I guess that's what happens when people "misunderstand" each other.
I applaud him for realizing the value of context in understanding what a meme is - not just spatial and cognitive context, but also temporal context - but the "instigator" double-speak is enough to prevent me from calling this a five star.
What I think he means is that memes can only be understood in their context and that meme transfer involves and requires significant amounts of common context in order to be successful. I wish he just said that instead of the rambling on-and-on about "instigators".
This is definitely a book worth looking at. I wouldn't recommend reading the whole thing if you've read any other books on memes or memetics - just use the introduction and table of contents to determine the relevant chapters for you. The only people who should read the whole thing are patient people who haven't heard much about memetics or who don't mind re-reading much similar material.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
The Design of Communication
By Charles Nix
In this excellent volume Aunger presents a clear and convincing argument. The meme is placed squarely in the brain, safely recreating itself, allowing all that goes on outside of the brain to be viewed in a fresh perspective. Aunger's clear explanations of concepts like signal correction, signal redundancy, and artifacts as repositories of memes should prove invaluable to those involved with the design of communication.
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