The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think [Paperback]

Aunger has formulated the meme theory in a way that resolves these problems. He is very careful in his reasoning compared to other popular books on memes and cultural transmission. He shows why cultural transmission is important, pulling from some of the same fascinating data as cultural selectionism researchers such as Boyd and Richerson. Cultural transmission matters because culture doesn't track with environmental, ecological, or genetic patterns. He then makes the crucial distinction for a true meme theory. He distinguishes the idea of a replicator and a duplication mechanism, and builds a model of memes specifically as replicators.

Cultural selection theory holds that culture plays a role in biological evolution, but doesn't neccessarily consider bits of culture tobe composed of self-copying replicators. The reason the distinction is important, Aunger makes clear, is that if they truly can be seen in that way, then they add an additional causal force for culture to take on a life of its own to transmit itself through us. This is the causal force that other meme authors have taken for granted, and Aunger makes it explicit and potentially testable.

In building his model of memes, Aunger finds that the definition can and should be made more specific, as a kind of complex residing in the brain rather than an arbitrary collection of artifacts, behaviors, and ideas. This model of memes gets around the problem of beliefs not being truly arbitrary by making it at least possible to connect the acceptance of memes back to our evolved computational engines as described by evolutionary psychologists.

This is a very rigorous and well-considered argument that finally takes real anthropological and biological data into consideration rather than simply making vague analogies of culture patterns to infection patterns of microbes, or providing a too-facile explanation for things we don't agree with (those guys were just infected by "religion memes," but we're immunized from that.")

I think this book is a landmark in the literature of modelling the transmission of human culture, and if the empirical testing it suggests bears fruit, it may well change the way we view human belief in general and have significant implications to epistemology.

On the downside, while this book is non-technical, it is academic in tone and is unlikely to have the same popular appeal as Brodie's dramatic "Virus of the Mind" or Susan Blackmore's very provocative "Meme Machine." On the other hand, it heralds a potential start for a real science of memetics, addressing the truly important questions (such as "do we have memes or do they have us ?") which those others books attempted to answer but assumed the answer from the start rather than framing the question in empirically testable terms and a more specific definition of a meme, potentially telling us how well memes act act as true replicators.

My big gripe (but it isn't that big) is that when the author seeks to avoid the problems with how memes transfer between brains, he winds up saying that they don't - they merely create conditions suitable for the recreation of the meme in the other brain. From my point of view, this is double-speak - to paraphrase the book, it says something like "they're not being transferred, because there are problems with memes being transferred, but they are being transferred, but we're not calling it that". This would basically mean that memes don't really get transferred, and that there's a definite possibility of those conditions not leading to recreation of the meme in the other brain. I guess that's what happens when people "misunderstand" each other.

I applaud him for realizing the value of context in understanding what a meme is - not just spatial and cognitive context, but also temporal context - but the "instigator" double-speak is enough to prevent me from calling this a five star.

What I think he means is that memes can only be understood in their context and that meme transfer involves and requires significant amounts of common context in order to be successful. I wish he just said that instead of the rambling on-and-on about "instigators".

This is definitely a book worth looking at. I wouldn't recommend reading the whole thing if you've read any other books on memes or memetics - just use the introduction and table of contents to determine the relevant chapters for you. The only people who should read the whole thing are patient people who haven't heard much about memetics or who don't mind re-reading much similar material.