Susan Blackmore
Susan Blackmore
Susan Jane Blackmoreis a British parapsychologist, freelance writer, lecturer, sceptic, and broadcaster on psychology and the paranormal, and is best known for her book The Meme Machine. She has written or contributed to over 40 books and 60 scholarly articles and is a contributor to The Guardian newspaper...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth29 July 1951
attracted biological depressed english-writer hierarchy people trace types
People get depressed and get attracted to different types of memes. You can trace some of this to how the biological hierarchy is set up.
giving brain three
In proportion to our body mass, our brain is three times as large as that of our nearest relatives. This huge organ is dangerous and painful to give birth to, expensive to build and, in a resting human, uses about 20 per cent of the body's energy even though it is just 2 per cent of the body's weight. There must be some reason for all this evolutionary expense.
bird population flu
For the planet's sake, I hope we have bird flu or some other thing that will reduce the population, because otherwise we're doomed.
ideas brain needs
I have not come up with anything original. It needs a better brain than mine! I have done what I can do in taking Dawkins' idea and extending it.
progress growing study
Parapsychology seems to be growing further away from the progress and excitement of the rest of consciousness studies.
clever quality female
Take male strategies for success in the world. If you've got all the advantages, if you're attractive and clever and all of that, you will generally go for very high quality females.
mistake thinking people
One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That's not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator.
thinking tree perception
Certainly almost everything we do and think is colored in some way by memes, but it is important to realize that not everything we experience is a meme. If I walk down the street and see a tree, the basic perception that's going on is not memetic.
mammals found memes
If you found a mammal with feathers, then you'd know that Darwin was wrong. Well, it's rather the same with memes.
design mind body
Just as the design of our bodies can be understood only in terms of natural selection, so the design of our minds can be understood only in terms of memetic selection.
thinking two creating
Memetics provides a new approach to the evolution of language in which we apply Darwinian thinking to two replicators, not one. On this theory, memetic selection, as well as genetic selection, does the work of creating language.
technology thinking care
'Temes' [technology-enhanced memes] don't care about us - they simply want to create more of themselves. Don't think we created the internet for our own benefit - think about temes spreading for themselves because they must.
consciousness illusion memes
Consciousness is an illusion constructed by the memes.
sex taken modern
The sale of sex in modern societies is not about spreading genes. Sex has been taken over by the memes.