The Meme Machine - Susan Blackmore - **

-- when I first heard about memes I had the same view as Gould: what use is this concept

Dawkins (1993) imagines useful self-replicating programs that might carry out market research by infecting many computers ..
-- nice prediction

Hunter-gatherers were estimated to spend only about fifteen hours a week hunting. . . Tudge assumes that agriculture arose because it was favoured by natural selection. He suggests that because farming produces more food from a given area of land, farmers will produce more children who will encroach on neighboring hunter-gatherers' lands and destroy their way of life.

Karl Popper's three "cosmic evolutionary stages":
World 1: bodies
World 2: brains
World 3: ideas

Much of human learning is Skinnerian [based on operant conditioning] and not memetic.

Patients who lost their emotional responses through brain damage did not become super-rational decision makers. Instead, when asked to make simple choices, they became paralyzed with indecision.

Imitation is learning something about the form of behavior through observing others. Social learning is learning about the environment by observing others. . . in social learning, one animal may invent a new behavior during individual learning and then somehow lead another animal into such a situation that it is likely to learn a similar behavior. The result looks like copying but it is not, because the behavior must be created anew by the second learner. . . the details of the first behavior are not transmitted and cannot be built upon.
-- the distinctions worth making are that humans consciously transmit ideas to each other and that humans can invent behaviors that have absolutely nothing to do with their environment. The point the author makes about how social learning isn't really copying is total crap: any behavior someone imitates without receiving an explanation from the guy who started it is automatically going to be created anew by the guy copying it.

The main principle behind the Lamarckian theory of evolution was that if you made a change during your lifetime, you could pass that change onto your offspring. The Lamarckian theory is obviously wrong for biological evolution - children of amputees aren't amputees - but it's an important concept.
-- memes might use Lamarckian evolution

A wagon with spoked wheels carries more than freight from place to place: it carries the brilliant idea of a wagon with spoked wheels from mind to mind.

The high percentage of energy the brain consumes is a misleading figure, because that figure refers to a body at rest.
Big brains are so expensive that if you could catch your prey with a slightly smaller one you would have an advantage.
The author suggests that big brains are required to store memes, among other things.

The difference between being an imitator and being an innovator is that imitation is a general skill. As an imitator, you can copy innovations in many fields, whereas innovation requires more specialization.
-- the tech tree goes imitate, modify, invent

Whom does it pay to imitate? The good imitators of course. Imagine a woman who is especially skilled at copying the latest ways of picking inaccessible fruits, or a man especially good at copying the best toolmaker.
-- if you try to copy someone who's making a copy you'll get a third-generation idea. Unless the imitator has made herself a better version of the skill, your third-generation copy would be a dilution of a dilution. Ideally, in this case, you'd want to go straight to the source and copy the innovator who first figured out how to pick the fruit - that way, less of the purity of the knowledge is lost.

There's no theoretical limit to how much modding someone can do, which makes contests between imitators wars of escalation.

WHY IMITATION IS COOL:
1. It pays to copy the best people in the field
2. It pays to mate with the best people in the field
3. A dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees the farther of the two [modders are likely to have better versions of skills than innovators, at a much lower cost]
4. Innovators are usually left behind when the field changes, but imitation is a general skill.

The process of sexual selection is the same as it is in examples of biological evolution, but with the added twist that the things being selected for can spread at the speed of memetic evolution. Meme-driven selection favors mating with males who are not only good at imitating in general, but who are good at imitating whatever happens to be the favored memes at the time.
-- the renaissance man knows the venerated ideas and skills of his time

Why do we talk so much? Meme theory offers some thoughts:
- talking is an efficient way of propagating memes
- it's hard to be silent when there are so many memes working so hard to be spread around
- talkers have an easier time converting closemouthed people to talkers than vice versa
- talking keeps social groups together

People seem to learn language by just picking it up, using minimal input to build richly structured grammatical speech.
Noam Chomsky pointed out that the logical structure of languages was far more complex than anyone had ever thought, and proposed the idea of an innate Universal Grammar. He thinks that our language capacity was not a function of natural selection: that it came from elsewhere.
-- this reminds me of how Pankration had similarities to Jiujitsu despite their having evolved hundreds of years apart in vastly distant regions. The comment was made that "there are only so many ways to break an arm". Could it be that this Universal Grammar reflects our being wired to express thoughts in a finite amount of predetermined patterns?

A theory on the evolution of language is that language was of benefit to memes, not genes. The memes then changed the environment in which the genes were selected, forcing them to build progressively better meme-spreading apparatuses.
-- in the early days, memes were survival-based, and if you could spread them around better it would provide a definite genetic advantage to the group you belonged to

r-selection: selection in unstable environments, where it pays to reproduce quickly and opportunistically
K-selection: selection in stable environments with heavy competition for limited resources, where it pays to produce a few large, long-lived, well-cared-for offspring

Successful evolution is all about the discovery of good tricks.
-- the Alex Valle vs. John Choi SFA2 match where Valle busted out the unblockable custom combo is an awesome illustration of this. From then on, the game was played using unblockable custom combos.
-- That match is also a testament to the power of imitation and adaptability: though Choi did end up losing, he quickly figured out what was happening and even used the trick against Valle.

Grammar improves replication. How many things can you say with a given set of words? Not many, unless you have some way of modifying them to express different meanings.

Evolutionary psychologist David Buss found that in every one of thirty-seven cultures, males preferred younger mattes and females preferred older ones.
Buss also wired people to electrodes and asked them to imagine their partners having sex with someone else or forming deep emotional attachments to someone else. For men, the sex caused distress; for women, distress was caused by the emotional infidelity.

In fair-skinned people, hair color darkens with age.
-- didn't know that

Women certainly want to get as much male investment as possible, but they may not be able to find good genes and a good provider in the same man. This is apparently true in zebra finches and swallows where the more attractive males have been shown to work less hard in bringing up the young, leaving the females to work harder. On the "best of both worlds" theory a woman's best bet may be to capture a nice yet unattractive man who will rear her children, then go get better genes from elsewhere. . . In a survey of nearly four thousand British women, the women who were having extramarital affairs tended to --have sex with their lovers more when they were ovulating - and this was not true for sex with their husbands.
-- thank you, DNA testing, for clamping down on this kind of behavior

Vertical transmission of memes: transmission from parent to child
Horizontal transmission of memes: transmission from unrelated source to child

Coercing homosexuals into acting like heterosexuals has actually helped spread homosexuality (through reproduction).

The women who devote more time to memes and less to genes are the most visible women, which makes them the most likely to be imitated.

With the advent of the internet more and more people are getting connected and spending inordinate amounts of time playing with new memes. The computer nerd is more in the thrall of the memes he plays with than of the genes he is carrying.
-- it is true, I am this nerd

From a meme's point of view, the time and effort expended on an adopted child are exactly as valuable as that expended on one's own offspring.

The memetic idea behind altruism is that anything that makes others want to spend time with you is potentially a good thing for your memes.
The altruism trick: where you do something nice for people, then try to leverage that gratitude into getting your idea accepted

potlatch: a Native American event where rival groups try to impress each other by giving away or destroying as much of their own stuff as they can
-- this is a bad meme

People are more easily influenced by people they like. The major factors that increase liking include physical attractiveness, similarity, cooperativeness, and the belief that the other person likes you.
One record-breaking salesman even used to send out thirteen thousand cards a month to his clients saying 'I like you' - and presumably he was not wasting his money.
-- the salesman was Joe Girard, author of How To Sell Anything To Anybody, and I'm pretty sure that was not a monthly occurence

The "light at the end of the tunnel" effect could be caused by the way the visual system works. Cells throughout the visual system are organized so that many are devoted to the center of vision and few are devoted to the periphery. When all the cells are firing randomly, the effect is like a bright light in the middle fading out toward the edges.
-- I looked this up, and what's happening is severe oxygen starvation and high doses of sympathetic nervous system activity are dilating the pupils, causing the light. Since blood flow is greatest to the center of the retina, everywhere else fades out first as its oxygen depletes. If blood flow is restored, the person is "drawn towards the light" as the bright area gets larger and larger.
-- the experience of movement can be accounted for by oxygen starvation messing with muscle spindles, which are proprioceptors. Even if the person is not moved, oxygen starvation causes convulsions, which get reported to the brain by the spindles.

The truth trick: saying "this explanation is the truth" and stopping there

The morality trick: where a meme people don't want attaches itself to a meme people want (or want to avoid!). You'll be cool if you buy our product, you'll be bad if you have sex before marriage, etc.

People typically go to psychics when they are at their lowest and want guidance. This means they are all the more likely to fall for claims of higher powers or special insight.

Literally thousands of experiments have demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that the claims of astrology are false, and yet one-quarter of American adults believed in the basic tenets of astrology according to a 1991 Gallup poll. These disturbing facts are better explained in terms of the power of the memes to replicate themselves than by writing all these people off as stupid, ignorant, or gullible.
-- memes of this nature have evolved thoughtcrime walls to prevent the critical facilities that make people successes in the real world from destroying their irrational beliefs

Alternative medicine preys on fear; fear of pain, disease, death. It uses a natural human experience that (for most people) has no satisfactory explanation: the experience of going to a practicioner and feeling better. Cognitive dissonance caused by dropping money on something that doesn't work is highly effective, especially in countries like England where conventional medicine is free.
-- I think another big reason it spreads is because of another human experience without a satisfactory explanation: NOT feeling better after a visit to a conventional doctor. If conventional medicine didn't meet your hypochondriac emotional needs, or if you didn't like the price you paid for the answer you got, you're vulnerable to anyone who can offer you a more fulfilling experience. Thus, the meme spreads.

Religions provide answers, though they may be false, and useful rules for living.

The marker trick: be good to people who act like you.
Markers that are costly or difficult to learn can deter exploitation by outsiders.

-- a lot of the religious stuff is not getting noted, because I plan on not having discussions about religion
-- the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism is pretty cool, I'll reprint it at the end of the book

The author suggests that the gear that marks the information age is related to mimetic evolution.

In 1820, a Cherokee Indian called Sequoyah observed that Europeans made marks on paper and went on to devise a system for writing down the Cherokee language. Although he was illiterate [duh] and knew no English, his observations were enough for him to devise a writing system so successful that Cherokees were soon writing, reading, and printing their own books and newspapers.

-- the author talks about Japanese kanji as an example of a language system that sucks, saying "We have yet to see whether the economic and cultural power of Japan is enough to ensure the survival of its complicated writing system in a world in which the transmission of memes is everything." This is an interesting point: kanji and its Chinese analog(s) are probably going to suffer in the face of systems like katakana and pinyin.

The telephone was bound to be a success, because people have evolved to want to talk to each other.
People keep predicting that the age of books will come to an end, but books are high-fecundity, high-fidelity, and long-lived.

If copies of copies are made then the errors are compounded, and any good tricks invested in the original product are lost.
-- the point I made earlier, where you don't want to copy the best imitators if all they're doing is making copies

The most common topic for searches on the world wide web is sex. The vast majority of computer games are based on killing and warfare. Any memes which can get into or tag along with such memeplexes are more likely to succeed.
-- I did some research and apparently there are MMOEGs - the E standing for Erotic. These would be pretty awesome for women, who could use them to feel sexy and safe.

Robots would need to be able to spread memes before they could become like humans.


THE NOBLE EIGHTFOLD PATH

Morality

1. Right Speech—One speaks in a non hurtful, not exaggerated, truthful way
2. Right Actions—Wholesome action, avoiding action that would do harm
3. Right Livelihood—One's way of livelihood does not harm in any way oneself or others; directly or indirectly

Mastery

1. Right Effort/Exercise—One makes an effort to improve
2. Right Mindfulness/Awareness—Mental ability to see things for what they are with clear consciousness
3. Right Concentration/Meditation—Being aware of the present reality within oneself, without any craving or aversion.

Wisdom

1. Right Understanding—Understanding reality as it is, not just as it appears to be.
2. Right Thoughts—Change in the pattern of thinking.