“It is very good that Wikipedia also gives a page to "Internet Meme". Internet memes are arguably the most important subset of memes today”

— Richard Dawkins , book The Selfish Gene

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/276449081746915328 (5 December 2012)
Twitter
Source: The Selfish Gene

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Feb. 28, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It is very good that Wikipedia also gives a page to "Internet Meme". Internet memes are arguably the most important sub…" by Richard Dawkins?

Richard Dawkins photo

Richard Dawkins 322

English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author 1941

Related quotes

“Leftist memes are 25 pages long and have footnotes.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

Original German: Linke Memes sind 25 Seiten lang und haben Fußnoten.
via Zebrabutter https://www.zebrabutter.net/der-film-glossary-of-broken-dreams-oder-im-schlachthaus-zum-goldenen-kalb.html

“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. This competition is the major selective force in the memosphere, and, just as in the biosphere, the challenge has been met with great ingenuity. For instance, whatever virtues (from our perspective) the following memes have, they have in common the property of having phenotypic expressions that tend to make their own replication more likely by disabling or preempting the environmental forces that would tend to extinguish them: the meme for faith, which discourages the exercise of the sort of critical judgment that might decide that the idea of faith was, all things considered a dangerous idea; the meme for tolerance or free speech; the meme of including in a chain letter a warning about the terrible fates of those who have broken the chain in the past; the conspiracy theory meme, which has a built-in response to the objection that there is no good evidence of a conspiracy: "Of course not — that's how powerful the conspiracy is!" Some of these memes are "good" perhaps and others "bad"; what they have in common is a phenotypic effect that systematically tends to disable the selective forces arrayed against them. Other things being equal, population memetics predicts that conspiracy theory memes will persist quite independently of their truth, and the meme for faith is apt to secure its own survival, and that of the religious memes that ride piggyback on it, in even the most rationalistic environments. Indeed, the meme for faith exhibits frequency-dependent fitness: it flourishes best when it is outnumbered by rationalistic memes; in an environment with few skeptics, the meme for faith tends to fade from disuse.”

Daniel Dennett book Consciousness Explained

Consciousness Explained (1991)

“Talking memes with @MaximeBernier”

Lauren Southern (1995) Canadian libertarian commentator

23 March 2017 https://twitter.com/Lauren_Southern/status/844905128373170177,

“When Richard Dawkins first published his idea of a meme, he made it clear he was speaking of "a unit of imitation"… Memes were supposed to be exclusive triumphs of humanity. But memes come in two different kinds—behavioral and verbal. …behavioral memes began brain-hopping long before there were such things as human minds.”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

Source: Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), Ch.6 Threading a New Tapestry

“Consciousness is an illusion constructed by the memes.”

Susan Blackmore (1951) British writer and academic

- Susan Blackmore, interview in MungBeing

“In any case, only someone miraculously innocent of history could believe that competition among ideas could result in the triumph of truth. Certainly ideas compete with one another, but the winners are normally those with power and human folly on their side. When the medieval Church exterminated the Cathars, did Catholic memes prevail over the memes of heretics? If the Final Solution had been carried to a conclusion, would that have demonstrated the inferiority of Hebrew memes?”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Truth and Consequences (p. 26-7)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

“The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 11. Memes: the new replicators

“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 (1951) British writer and academic

Life lessons http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5164417-111414,00.html, Guardian, 04/07/2005

“Philosophers might care to ask themselves … how often they are accomplices in increasing the audience for a second-rate article simply because their introductory course needs a simple-minded version of a bad idea that even freshmen can refute. Some of the most frequently reprinted articles in twentieth-century philosophy are famous precisely because nobody believes them; everybody can see what's wrong with them. … The confirmation of this claim is left as an exercise for the reader. Among the memes that structure the infosphere and hence affect the transmission of other memes are the laws of libel.”

Daniel Dennett book Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

“The capacity to evolve must be evolved itself. Evolution has been, and will keep on, exploring the space of possible evolutions. Organisms, memes, the whole ball of wax are only evolution's way to keep evolving.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Related topics