The Meme Machine Audiobook (Free)

First coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, a meme is any idea, behavior, or skill that may be transferred in one person to another by imitation: stories, fashions, inventions, recipes, songs, ways of plowing a field or throwing a football or making a sculpture.

Susan Blackmore shows that once our distant ancestors acquired the key capability to imitate, another kind of organic selection began, a success of the fittest amongst competing ideas and behaviors. Ideas and behaviors about The Meme Machine that proved most adaptive-making tools, for instance, or using language-survived and flourished, replicating themselves in as much minds as you possibly can. These memes after that handed themselves on from generation to era by assisting to ensure that the genes of these who acquired them also survived and reproduced.

Applying this theory to many aspects of human life, Blackmore provides brilliant explanations for why we reside in cities, why we talk a lot, why we can’t stop considering, why we act altruistically, how exactly we select our mates, plus much more. With controversial implications for our spiritual beliefs, our free of charge will, our extremely feeling of ‘self,’ The Meme Machine gives a provocative theory everyone will soon be talking about.