The Meme's Eye View

Abstract

One of the most celebrated commentaries on the meme hypothesis has been provided by the psychologist Susan Blackmore in her 1999 book The Meme Machine . Blackmore, like Dawkins and Dennett, accepts that the distinction between virus and replicator is as valid in culture as in biology. Like Dennett, too, she believes that the mind is a meme complex. It is impossible to untangle this mistake from various other strands of Blackmore's thesis – just as it remains inextricably linked with Dennett's confused perception of vehicles and phenotypes, and with Dawkins's erroneous overextension of the virus-replicator distinction – and thus I shall challenge the elements of Blackmore's thought which lead her to share Dennett's view. In particular she focuses on the issue of imitation, to which she assigns enormous significance. Other commentators like Dan Sperber, Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson have vehemently disagreed with her analysis, and this chapter also considers their views in the light of what Blackmore has to say. Copy-the-Product Versus Copy-the-Instructions I return first to the thorny issue of memes and their effects, which Blackmore acknowledges as an area of confusion when applied to culture. The confusion arises, she says, because of the desire to make an inappropriately close analogy between genes and memes. In the case of memes, she believes that it may be better to abandon altogether the attempt to distinguish sharply between replicators and their effects.

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