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Susan Blackmore Susan Blackmore has done research on memes (which she wrote about in her popular book The Meme Machine), evolutionary theory, consciousness, and the paranormal. She has also appeared on television a number of times, discussing such phenomena as the intelligence of apes. She also acted as one of the psychologists who featured on the British version of the television show "Big Brother," speaking about the psychological state of the contestants. She was on the editorial board for the Journal of Memetics (an electronic journal) from 1997 to 2001, and has been a consulting editor of the Skeptical Inquirer since 1998. Her latest book, Consciousness: An Introduction (2004), is a textbook that broadly covers the field of consciousness studies. In it she covers a wide variety of topics such as the mind-body problem, the hard problem of consciousness, philosophy of mind, Cognitive neuropsychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, evolution, parapsychology, altered states of consciousness, phenomenology, Buddhism, and meditation. In sidebars of her book she has written brief profiles about various notable contributors to the field such as Daniel Dennett, John Searle, David Chalmers, Patricia Churchland, Francis Crick, Antonio Damasio, V.S. Ramachandran, John Carew Eccles, Rodney Brooks, Alan Turing, Francisco Varela, Rene Descartes, David Hume, William James, and the Buddha. Blackmore's treatment of memetics insists that memes are true evolutionary replicators, a second replicator that like genetics is subject to the Darwinian Algorithm and undergoes evolutionary change. Her prediction on the central role played by imitation as the cultural replicator and the neural structures that must be unique to our species necessary to support it have recently been confirm by research on mirror neurons and the differences in extent of these structures between humans and our closest ape relations. In her work on memetics she has emphasized the role that Darwinian mechanisms play in cultural evolution and has helped develop the field of Universal Darwinism.
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Blackmore's website
Susan Blackmore Quotes In proportion to our body mass, our brain is three times as large as that of our nearest relatives. This huge organ is dangerous and painful to give birth to, expensive to build and, in a resting human, uses about 20 per cent of the body's energy even though it is just 2 per cent of the body's weight. There must be some reason for all this evolutionary expense. If you found a mammal with feathers, then you'd know that Darwin was wrong. Well, it's rather the same with memes. If you went into Tutankhamen's tomb and found something written in the style of Beethoven's 9th, you'd know that memetic theory is wrong. If you read the Koran, you will find all the terrible things that happen to people who don't follow all the rules. When you pass all the ideas on together and you don't allow people to disobey various rules and so on, that provides a very effective way for the memes to propagate themselves. When I was talking about how computers are improving memetic storage, allowing for greater repetition, variation and so forth; you can see the same process must have happened with the origins of language. Language provides you with a much better system for producing more memes. You start by copying other peoples paintings or music or whatever. You get all of those skills before you branch out. Really creative people have a fantastic ability to copy things and then combine them in new ways. And whether we're talking about genes or memes, recombination is the real heart of creativity.
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