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Title: The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think by Robert Aunger ISBN: 0-7432-0150-7 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 01 July, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $27.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A New Theory of How We Think
Comment: Cultural evolutionist Aunger stalks the wild meme in this abstruse treatise. Zoologist Richard Dawkins originally coined the word "meme" as the cultural analogue of a gene: an idea, artifact, or piece of behavior that can be transmitted from person to person, survive competition, and be shared by a group in the course of cultural evolution. Memeticist Susan Blackmore chose imitation and social learning as the sine qua non of memes. Daniel Dennett raised the question of who benefits, putting memes in contention with genes to win a race involving cultural traits. Their ideas (as well as those of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists) are flawed-too simplistic, too reductionist, or too conflating of genes and memes, according to Aunger, who wants to establish a physical realty for the concept. Memes must first and foremost be replicators, he states, faithfully producing duplicates of themselves according to strict rules. He elaborates on this notion by detouring into two other forms of non-genetic replication: computer viruses and prions, which are malformed proteins in the brain. Memes, too, are in the brain: the electric meme exists at a "node"-a neuron in a particular state or a set of interconnected neurons-and is able to induce the same configuration at another node (allowing for modification so as to evolve) in a matter of milliseconds and in a manner akin to short-term memory. Indeed, he asserts, neuromemes are memories. Memes can't move from brain to brain, however; they use "instigator signals" for transmission. Signals also can emanate from artifacts such as wagons, books, or computers; they are the means by which complexity is built into cultural evolution. In the end, Aunger offers a theory of co-evolution of memes and technology. By this time, skeptical readers, while marveling at the colossus he has constructed to account for culture (with a few deus ex machina elements thrown), will probably remain unconvinced. No more successful than the hunting of the snark.
Rating: 5
Summary: Give Electric Memes a chance
Comment: The Electric Meme is a superb book. It is fresh, original, deep and entertaining. Memeticists should be truly grateful to Aunger (Richard Dawkins first in line) for giving memes the only reality they can possibly have. I am not (yet) a meme-believer myself, but I totally share Aunger's statement that "establishing whether memes exist is a scientific project of primary importance"(p.333). And I admire Aunger for saying "I will accept the conclusion of this project either way: memes or no memes". That's beautiful. From now on, if you want to talk about memes, pro or contra, you simply have to know what this book is saying. All that has been written so far is already pre-history.
Rating: 2
Summary: Aunger gets ahead of himself
Comment: This is rigorous and well researched, but it gets ahead of itself. To say that memes (or meme components) correspond to some sort of pattern in human brains is saying more than we know now about the correspondence between brain states and our thoughts and experiences. If we don't know this for one brain, then certainly we don't know how these analogous states can be replicated across brains. Ambitious work, but too soon.
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Title: The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore, Richard Dawkins ISBN: 019286212X Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics As a Science by Robert Aunger ISBN: 0192632442 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2000 List Price(USD): $59.50 |
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Title: Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennett ISBN: 0670031860 Publisher: Viking Books Pub. Date: 10 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Complete Universe of Memes: Branches of Reality on the Reality Tree by Lloyd Harrison Whitling ISBN: 0595244297 Publisher: Writers Club Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins ISBN: 0192860925 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1990 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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