Richard Dawkins- I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.
- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976) - I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drfiting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate which leaves the old gene panting far behind.
- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976) - We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism - something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.
- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976) - Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old.
- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976) - God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.
- Richard Dawkins - The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
- Richard Dawkins - Time and again, my sociobiological colleagues have upbraided me as a turncoat, because I will not agree with them that the ultimate criterion for the success of a meme must be its contribution to Darwinian “fitness”. At bottom, they insist, a “good meme” spreads because brains are receptive to it, and the receptiveness of brains is ultimately shaped by (genetic) natural selection.
- Richard Dawkins, 1982 - Consider the idea of God. We do not know how it arose in the meme pool. Probably it originated many times by independent ‘mutation’. In any case, it is very old indeed. How does it replicate itself? By the spoken and written word, aided by great music and great art. Why does it have such a high survival value? Remember that ‘survival value’ here does not mean value for a gene in a gene pool, but value for a meme in a meme pool. The question really means: What is it about the idea of a god that gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal.
- Richard Dawkins Daniel Dennett- Words are memes that can be pronounced.
- Daniel Dennett - The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.
- Daniel Dennett - Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry in as many minds as possible.
- Daniel Dennett - I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe.
- Daniel Dennett Susan Blackmore- Imagine a world full of brains, and far more memes than can possibly find homes. Which memes are more likely to find a safe home and get passed on again?
- Susan Blackmore - The Meme Machine - 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.
- Susan Blackmore - The Meme Machine - 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.
- Susan Blackmore - The Meme Machine - Consciousness is an illusion constructed by the memes.
- Susan Blackmore - interview in MungBeing - 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.
- Susan Blackmore - Wired.com, 2/29/2008 - Free will and consciousness is an illusion, and the self is a complex of memes.
- Susan Blackmore - Wired.com, 2/29/2008 - If everyone understood evolution, then the tyranny of religious memes would be weakened, and we little humans might find a better way to live in this pointless universe.
- Susan Blackmore - Life lessons, Guardian, 04/07/2005 - The sale of sex in modern societies is not about spreading genes. Sex has been taken over by the memes.
- Susan Blackmore - The Meme Machine Historical- The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
- Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871 - A remarkable parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zoölogical evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin on the other.
- William James, 1880 - I shall borrow two words used for a slightly different purpose by the great demographer Alfred Lotka to distinguish between the two systems of heredity enjoyed by man: endosomatic or internal heredity for the ordinary or genetical heredity we have in common with animals; and exosomatic or external heredity for the non-genetic heredity that is peculiarly our own - the heredity that is mediated through tradition, by which I mean the transfer of information through non-genetic channels from one generation to the next.
- Peter Medawar - We have seen that in certain respects operant reinforcement resembles the natural selection of evolutionary theory. Just as genetic characteristics which arise as mutations are selected or discarded by their consequences, so novel forms of behavior are selected or discarded through reinforcement.
- B. F. Skinner, 1953 - The evolution of cultures appears to follow the pattern of the evolution of species. The many different forms of culture which arise correspond to the "mutations" of genetic theory. Some forms prove to be effective under prevailing circumstances and others not, and the perpetuation of the culture is determined accordingly.
- B. F. Skinner, 1953 - The fact that a culture may survive or perish suggests a kind of evolution, and a parallel with the evolution of species has, of course, often been pointed out. It needs to be stated carefully. A culture corresponds to a species. We describe it by listing many of its practices, as we describe a species by listing many of its anatomical features. Two or more cultures may share a practice, as two or more species may share an anatomical feature. The practices of a culture, like the characteristics of a species, are carried by its members, who transmit them to other members. In general, the greater the number of individuals who carry a species or a culture, the greater its chance of survival.
- B. F. Skinner, 1971 - Languages are natural organisms, which, without being determinable by the will of man, arose, grew, and developed themselves, in accordance witli fixed laws, and then again grow old and die out; to them, too, belongs that succession of phenomena which is wont to be termed 'life'. Glottik, the science of language, is accordingly a natural science; its method is on the whole and in general the same with that of the other natural sciences.
- August Schleicher, 1863 - There is a striking parallel between the spreading of germs and the spreading of ideas or propaganda. On the one hand we are dealing with a virus which can be transported and transmitted under certain conditions which favor or limit its transportation or transmission: on the other hand with ideas, religions, and doctrines, which can be described as germs, benevolent or malevolent, according to the point of view one takes up. These germs can either remain at their source and be sterile, or emerge in the spreading of infection.
- André Siegfried, 1960 - the processes of natural selection and survival of ideas in cultural evolution are analogous to the natural selection and survival of DNA molecules in biological evolution, and that ideas are the key to understanding cultural evolution just as DNA molecules are the key to understanding biological evolution.
- Van Rensselaer Potter, 1964 Misc - William S. Burroughs, Word Virus (1998:208) - Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992: 327) - Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking of the meme for, say, “belief in life after death” is actually realised physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.
- Nicholas Humphrey, quoted in 1976 - In a human carrier, then, a cultural instruction is more analogous to a viral or bacterial gene than to a gene of the carrier's own genome. It is like an active parasite that controls some behavior of its host. It may be in complete mutual symbiosis with the human host, in which case the behavior it produces has survival value for itself through the value it has for the survival/reproduction of the host. On the other hand, it may be like the gene of a flu or "cold" virus; when the virus makes the host behave, e.g., sneeze, that behavior results in extraorganismic self-replication of the virus gene but not in survival or reproduction of the host or his conspecific. From the organism's point of view, the best that can always be said for cultural instructions, as for parasites of any sort, is that they can't destroy their hosts more quickly than they can propagate. In short, "our" cultural instructions don't work for us organisms; we work for them. At best, we are in symbiosis with them, as we are with our genes. At worst, we are their slaves
- Ted Cloak, 1975 - The fundamental insight triggered by memetic studies is that a belief may spread without necessarily being true or helping the human being holding the belief in any way.
- Keith Stanovich, The Robots Rebellion (p. xii) - "It's the words," he said shyly. "They're virulent."
- Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden (1990: 58) - Quite possibly new memes that we are creating and are themselves vigorously 'Darwinizing' and thus self-improving may acquire strength to take us over almost completely, much in the way that a brain worm takes over behaviour in an ant.
- William Hamilton, 2002 - My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute. But the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of a virus: it's an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself.
- William S. Burroughs, 1985 Critical comments- My own suspicion is that these structural differences between culture and genetics will inevitably limit the usefulness of the kind of theory presented in this book. The explanatory power of evolutionary theory rests largely on three assumptions: that mutation is non-adaptive, that acquired characters are not inherited, and that inheritance is Mendelian—that is, it is atomic, and we inherit the atoms, or genes, equally from our two parents, and from no one else. In the cultural analogy, none of these things is true. This must severely limit the ability of a theory of cultural inheritance to say what can happen and, more importantly, what cannot happen.
- John Maynard Smith - Take the meme controversy. The disputants take the main issue to be whether culture is highly analogous to genes or not. If so, then their evolution is to be explained by fitness, if not, Darwinism is useless. If we are correct, this debate is an utter red herring. The proper approach is to recognize that the analogy between genes and culture is quite loose, and to build up a theory of cultural evolution that takes into account the actual properties of the cultural system.
- Henrich, Boyd and Richerson - In neither his definition nor the examples illustrating what memes are does Dawkins mention anything that would distinguish memes from concepts.
- Ernst Mayr, 1997 - Stop being so literal-minded! respond the fans of cultural evolution. Of course cultural evolution is not an exact replica of the Darwinian version. In cultural evolution, the mutations are directed and the acquired characteristics are inherited. Lamarck, while being wrong about biological evolution, turned out to be right about cultural evolution. But this won't do. Lamarck, recall, was not just unlucky in his guess about life on this planet. As far as explaining complex design goes, his theory was, and is, a non-starter. It is mute about the beneficent force in the universe or all-knowing voice in the organism that bestows the useful mutations. And it's that force or voice that's doing all the creative work. To say that cultural evolution is Lamarckian is to confess that one has no idea how it works.
- Steven Pinker - For memetics to be a reasonable research programme, it should be the case that copying, and differential success in causing the multiplication of copies, overwhelmingly plays the major role in shaping all or at least most of the contents of culture. Evolved domain-specific psychological dispositions, if there are any, should be at most a relatively minor factor that could be considered part of background conditions.
- Dan Sperber - Memeticists have to give empirical evidence to support the claim that, in the micro-processes of cultural transmission, elements of culture inherit all or nearly all their relevant properties from other elements of culture that they replicate.
- Dan Sperber - The problem for the meme concept is that if the developmental processes that vehicles undergo result in the generation of variations that are heritable, then the distinction between genelike replicators and phenotype-vehicles breaks down. Since heritable variations in behavior and ideas (memes) are reconstructed by individuals and groups (vehicles) through learning, it is impossible to think about the transmission of memes in isolation from their development and function.
- Eva Jablonka, Marion J. Lamb, 2005 - Specific units – such as memes are intended to represent have meaning when there is essential discontinuity between categories. Such convenient discontinuities are found in atoms, elementary particles, genes, and DNA.
- Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 1981
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