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Summary: Bold book with good arguments, but lacking in evidence.
Review: A bold book with extremely bold theories, laid out in a persuasive form. Unfortunately, the book's weakest point is in the first few chapters, when Blackmore tries to assert the study of memes as a necessary field of science. Her arguments are deft, but she still cannot hide the simple fact that memes are undefined, unquantifiable, unfalsifiable, theoretical constructs. Her argument that that was how the concept of genes started off is a glaring philosophical foul-up (ie. just because some related fact is true or false, doesn't make the other case in point true or false)
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Summary: Cogent argument for materialist mind
Review: Chapter 17 "The Ultimate Memeplex" is the most cogent summary of empirical research concerning the role of consciousness and a self-aware self in behavior I have read. She reaches the conclusions that dualism is wrong and that consciousness does NOT control behavior. I've been introducing these ideas to my sophomore experimental psychology students for twenty years. I'm delighted to find a chapter that organizes so beautifully the arguments. I showed the book to a colleague and he has added it to the required reading list for his evolutionary psychology seminar.
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Summary: In the tradition of Dawkins, Dennett, Jaynes, and Wright
Review: Blackmore's book is thought-provoking and mind expanding. I appreciate the way that she ties her ideas to those that have come before her--especially Dawkins and Dennett. I was also struck by the way in which memes MIGHT fit nicely into Julian Jaynes' thesis. While I enjoyed the entire book, the most exciting part of the book was Blackmore's discussion of self and free will. Comparing her conclusions in this area with the closing remarks of Darwin's Dangerous Idea and the Moral Animal make for interesting connections. All in all, a terrific book.
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Summary: Homage to Dawkins's Meme
Review: Susan J. Blackmore has captured Dawkins's terse, accurate writing style. The Meme Machine is a fast, thoughtful read with brilliant insights. If you like Dawkins ... you'll love Blackmore!
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Summary: A provocative inquiry into the genealogy of thought.
Review: Don't believe the critics of this book. Read it yourself. This is not pop-psychology but scientific inquiry at its best. Blackmore gives her critics the ammunition to discredit her theory and then invites them to do so. But most of the criticism of her book amounts to an attack on materialism by people who can't stand the thought that idealism is dead and can't be argued into anything more than a wishful existence--which won't stand up to scientific scrutiny. Scientists who autopsy the human brain are never going to find a meme any more than they'll find a soul. The whole field of memetics may amount to nothing more than a flashlight grope in a cave, but it's a very thoughtful probe in the dark and it may be far more useful than most. Highly recommended.
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Summary: Fails to give convincing evidence that memes are replicators
Review: My only exposure to memetics has been through Barbara Blackmore's "The Meme Machine". So my mostly critical remarks that follow relate just to the book, not to the general "field" of memetics. Since I haven't read further, I am presently perhaps deprived of getting a more accurate, balanced, etc. view of memetics. On the other hand it might be helpful that my take on memetics is coming from someone who has only been exposed to her book, and might prove instructive to those out there who are trying to promote the idea of memetics. Such people have created a journal, a web newsgroup and lots of writings. I assume from all of that activity that there must be more to memetics than Ms.Blackmore provides evidence for. I frankly feel like I have been on an intellectual snipe hunt, and expected at the end of the book to be met with a "gotcha"! My take is this. A meme is apparently any information packet that can be transmitted from one human to another. It can be the tune "Happy Birthday", the idea of celibacy, this newsgroup posting, etc. I can see how a meme like a rumor can spread and even can be said to spread like a virus, and in a sense behaves in a life-like manner. Where does this sometimes life-like behavior come from? It comes from the transmitting, storing, forwarding steps that are inherent in communication from one human to another to another. What guides these processes? The behavior is determined by the human machine that is defined by its genes, its history and the state of the environment at the time of the behavior. The meme information packet is the object being acted upon by these factors. It is not an actor. Although the spread of memes can be described as life-like, the liveliness comes from the humans' behavior, not the memes. The meme does not have life. It does not create things. Memes, unlike genes, do not contain blueprints that determine how they are replicated. They are the tail and not the dog. They are correlated with behavior, they are not the cause of the behavior. Blackmore has a refrain "Imagine a world full of brains, and far more memes than can possibly find homes. Which memes are more likely to find homes and get passed on again?" She considers a variety of situation and often gives reasons why some memes take and others don't. Oddly for her point of view, these reasons are usually couched in terms of human behavior. Yet at the end she will ascribe some animism to the meme, not the human. Like her explanation celibacy. She explains how it can spread power. The celibacy meme is in the service of human power. The service to itself is correlated, but incidental. Often once you unpack the claims about memes, the meme goes away. Of course things are connected and spread, survive. Burke in his "Connections" book and PBS TV series chronicles many fascinating cases. The dynamics are understandable on their own terms without any need for the meme-as-replicator theory. She starts with trying to explain why we have all these thoughts running around in our heads. Basically she says they are rehearsing, to be ready for the moment "when you next speak to someone else", so they can get replicated. What is so faulty with this line of thinking is not the imputed animism of the meme, but that just isn't what most thoughts are involved in. We have many thoughts that we would NEVER want to turn into words and leave our mouths. And even more of our thoughts are behind words that we only intend for our immediate audience, often a single colleague, customer, friend, customer, etc. There is usually no wish that the meme reach a wider audience and replicate itself. The intellectual laziness of such notions should put up a serious red flag. She goes on to explain away language, religion, free will/determinism, consciousness, etc. But it is just intellectual hand-waving, at least to me, and seems of no more value than trying to explain away illnesses as coming from swamp gas. She frets that some rather great minds haven't got on the meme bandwagon. She also hold out hope that some kind of future research will prove her out. The two back-cover testimonials by Dawkins and Dennett are wryly amusing. Dawkins says she has given the theory a "great shot". Dennett says that it is a "major eye-opener". The theory about a snipe being at the end of the ditch might elicit the same descriptions. Dawkins and Dennett don't come close to saying that they support the theory. Are we, the readers (and purchasers) of this book left holding the bag? I hope someone will respond to this and tell me what it is about memetics that she has not been able to convey, at least to me, that accounts for all of the interest in the subject and can someone recommend a book that better presents the case for being excited about memetics?
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Summary: Dont mistake this for science
Review: Susan Blackmore here continues her crusade to persuade the world that materialism has some special right of place in science, rather than being a woolly metaphysics laced with contradictions (never mind that memes are not material...the basis for them is of course the brain). When you are an academic you have a SPECIAL duty to be open and fair-minded in your arguments, and not to pull the wool over the eyes of the public by making ideas which are nothing but indulgent personal speculations sound like ratified scientific truths. This is the very worst kind of "science" book. Off the top of my head, it is difficult to remember another quite as bad, except perhaps Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works, or Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained. Intellectual mutton dressed up as lamb, and capped memorably by the absurd endorsement from Richard Dawkins.
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Summary: If you read one science fact book this year, chose this one.
Review: The idea of memes is not new, but The Meme Machine gives a fresh and readable perspective to the concept, and certainly adds many new ideas. It gets really interesting from chapter 7 onwards, but do not skip the early chapters. The book will give you a fresh perspective on the world you live in. Understanding is easier if you choose the right view point. It is no more true to say that the Earth goes round the sun as visa-versa, but if you insist on putting the Earth at the centre then it is very difficult to understand and have a mental model of the solar system or indeed the rest of the universe. The theory of memes as self replicating ideas in the substrate of human minds and co-existing with self replicating genes in the substrate of human bodies makes it easier to understand many baffling phenomena of life, from seemingly irrational religious beliefs through why people are altruistic and to which pop tunes, films, and toys sales at Christmas are the most successful. Dr Blackmore goes on to say that physical objects (eg computers) can be considered as physical objects which self replicate by using human labour motivated by memes. She fails to make the connection between this and the peculiar behaviour of shares on the stock market in companies like Intel and Microsoft. But these sorts of links will fill the minds of readers of her book who have expertise in other areas. (No financial professional predicted the long term rise and rise of these shares - most booms end in bust. Once you understand how memes affect physical objects, and couple this with an understanding of how computers design newer and bigger computers and you can see why these stocks really are different from food retailers, hospitality stocks and even car and white goods manufacturers, taking the point of view of a long term investment strategy.) Dr Blackmore introduced a plausible theory of altruism which seemed very logical to me, but disappointing no doubt to the "sack cloth and ashes" brigade motivated by The Parable of the Widows Mite. Incidentally she did have things to say about the motivation of people like Bob "give till it hurts" Geldorff,. Mother Teresa, and Diana, Princess of Wales, that may offend some. However any sensible person will see the comments not as personal criticism or insults, but an honest attempt to explain the phenomena of certain world figures in a scientific manner. Her discussion of the subject of scientific and artistic creativity and the cult of the inventor agrees with what I and some inventors already know about the process of invention. [AH Reeves, the inventor of PCM, said something similar a public lecture in 1962 about the equilibrium process (a sort of one dimensional neural network). Invention is like seeing paintings in a gallery - you may tell your friends that you have seen a nice painting, but you don't pat yourself on the back for painting it. I think what he meant is that the ideas that make up an invention exist outside individuals, the individual credited with "making an invention" just points them out to the rest of humanity.] But there is a world of difference between a gut reaction and a carefully worded argument with references. Dr Blackmore gives us this argument. Intellectual property rights enthusiasts and patent and copyright lawyers will have cause for thought at the ideas in this book. If shares could be bought in legal institutions, I would not regard these areas of law as one for long term investment if Dr Blackmore's work gets incorporated into the way our modern civilisation functions. Linux is a very relevant phenomenum. However in the face of these superlatives, I did feel let down by the final two chapters when she went on to discuss the nature of self and the nature of consciousness. She tried to cram too much into a short section - these need further thought and work and certainly one or more whole books. She produced a theory of self, expressed in terms of "memeplexes", and then went on to discuss how to thwart the self and switch it off, which I must say I found a non-sequitur. (Or maybe I totally misunderstood what she is getting at.) You don't after all, discover a useful mechanism to describe the behaviour of something and then immediately try to exterminate it. Memetics is undoubtedly a useful too to understand humanity, but just because we understand ourselves better is no sensible reason to deny ourselves existence. It should be a tool to enable people to lead more fulfilling lives and live in better harmony. The fact that it is yet another scientific finding that denies the existence of a personal god is not a reason to deny the self, by whatever means the concept of self actually works. But these final moans aside, I would say that if you read one science fact book this year, chose this one - you will never see yourself or anyone else in quite the same way again, and if you read it late at night be prepared for some strange dreams.
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Summary: A wealth of stimulating ideas...
Review: This book has a wealth of stimulating ideas. It is great fun to read and its sheer enthusiasm for the meme concept is compelling. However some of the ideas could have been thought through a little more rigorously, and some of them, in the last two chapters, perhaps go a little too far to be convincing. The role of memes in brain development which was covered by Dennett in 'Consciousness Explained' is further explored here. The author argues that memes through their replicating ability have been the agent responsible for the development of the 'big brain' in humans. However she does not offer a convincing account of how this actually occurred. A more plausible scenario (in my view) is that memes may have played two differing roles in this process. Brain development, on such a massive scale, far in advance of any environmental requirement or possible use at that time, must surely have been triggered by sexual selection for intelligence. However, selection for intelligence is not easy without clues. In the absence of a developed language, the early memes, which would at least have demonstrated an ability to learn and imitate, could have been invaluable in signalling intelligence to a potential partner. The development of brain size, in terms of sheer bulk, essentially stopped some 100,000 years ago because of birth canal limitations. Faced with this (sic) bottleneck, the second major role for memes, as argued persuasively by Dennett, has probably been the build up of software capability within the brain thus hugely enhancing its internal efficiency. The author also suggests that the defining feature of a meme as its ability to be 'imitated.' This has been criticised by other reviewers, correctly in my view, as being too narrow and artificial a definition. She also proposes that the 'likeability' or 'sociability' of a particular individual is the key determinant in promoting replication of that persons memes. Whilst clearly a factor this concept must be too narrow since there are so many obvious exceptions. Machievelli's memes are very widely spread but no one would propose that this is because of his likeability. I would suggest an alternative definition. The key requirement for any meme which survives and replicates is that it 'must offer some apparent benefit or advantage to its host.' Any meme which does this will survive and any not doing so will die.
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Summary: The world is still waiting for "the book" on memes.
Review: Ever since Dawkins wrote his chapter on memes in The Selfish Gene, people have become captivated by the meme meme. Several people have attempted to wrap their minds around the concept, and present it in a useful and comprehensive way. While Blackmore's attempt is, I think, the best yet, it tries to do too much, and ends up collapsing under its own weight. Some of the assertions, such as the development of large brains in humans being a function of memes' imperative, while possibly correct in part, lose the force of their argument by their overstatement. Humans are thinking machines, not copying machines, and brains evolved to think. Memes ride along, for better or worse, on the waves created by the constant motion of our thoughts. Not the other way around. I believe memetics will someday prove to be a valuable tool for understanding some cultural and behavioural aspects of humans. But right now, they still more resemble Gould's "meaningless metaphor" description.
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