The Meme Machine

Susan Blackmore's 1999 book argues that memes, the units of imitated culture, are replicators that evolve apart from genes, and that memetics deserves recognition as a science.

Richard Dawkins, who introduced the term in The Selfish Gene, wrote the foreword. Blackmore holds that a universal replicator needs fidelity, a high rate of reproduction and longevity, and that memes meet all three. She suggests memes may have driven the genetic evolution of the large human brain, and applies the idea to language, sexuality, the internet and the sense of self. Oxford University Press published it in 1999 with 264 pages.

Blackmore is a British writer, lecturer and skeptic, born in 1951, who earned a PhD in parapsychology at the University of Surrey and moved from belief in the paranormal to scientific doubt. She taught at the University of the West of England until 2001 and later wrote Consciousness: An Introduction and Conversations on Consciousness.