Aleksa's Book Review: The Meme Machine

I see Dr. Dawkins has made a habit of writing forewords for books on memetics. In any case, this is a book that expands on the work of Brodie and Dawkins, and primarily focuses on the aspect of memetics that has to do with replication. It details the emergent property of replicators in nature, such as genes and memes. These replicators focus on fidelity, fecundity and longevity.

A rather thorough focus on sexual selection, cellular multiplication and similar processes makes the book a bit more padded than is generally welcome, but the result is a very thorough evolutionary-biology approach to the field of memetics that infoms the reader about the absolute fundamentals of multiplication strategies and natural selection. Concrete examinations of mimetics, imitation, and selection therefor is explained as well.

The name of the book has to do with the human mind (with the powerful concept of self-plex), which is a vehicle for memes the same way an individual organism is a vehicle for genes, and it is the gene and/or meme that is the actual subject of competition and selection. It is a machine because it progressively tests them out and discards the ones that are the least fit at reproducing: a notable example from the book mentions a soup recipe that explains it very well.

In closing, this book is extremely useful for understanding the basics of memetics and I suggest that this be read immediately after "The Selfish Gene" for the thoroughness of analysis. My gripes are that the book is entirely too long and dry, but that's to be expected of academic sources such as Blackmore.
7/10