virus: Blackmore's book

Eric Boyd (6ceb3@qlink.queensu.ca)
Wed, 16 Jun 1999 22:48:50 -0400

Hey hey Virians!

Just a quick note to let you know (again) that Susan Blackmore's new book _The Meme Machine_ utterly blows my mind! Her "imitation" approach to memetics solves many of the problems we have identified -- and she has some *very* clear cut predictions that memetics makes which are immediatly testable (and not intuitivily obvious, to boot).

Blackmore also has great sections on the evolution of "big brains" in humans and the evolution of language -- and explains both with memetics! (*convincingly*). Every page has me exclaiming "fuck yea! this is amazing". She has finally given memetics a role in scientific explaination -- something Lynch tried to do, but failed (IMO). Richard: I think staking your reputation on memetics as a science will turn out for the best. Blackmore has convinced me that biological evolution alone cannot explain *our* existence -- then goes on to show how memetics covers the gap.

David: just in case you don't know, I thought I'd let you know that in Dawkins' forward to the book, he actually gives out this URL:

http://www.lucifer.com/virus/memlex.html

It is unfortunatly complicated by a line break and a #meme reference, but I still think Virus could benefit by making the back-link to

http://virus.lucifer.com/

more visible, not to mention fixing the (broken) link to KMO's page.

It might also be fun to insert the definition of Virus into the text of the page, with a link. We might as well capitalize on the fact that Dawkins makes a reference to the church (which I thought was great), and then sends his readers to a page *we control*. Let's get our meme engineering skills fired up and make sure than anyone visiting that page also continues on to read the Virus web page, eh? (Virus has been *designed* to infect you...)

ERiC