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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. 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. |
