## Metadata * Author: [[Richard Dawkins]] * ASIN: B01GI5F2FS * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01GI5F2FS ## Highlights Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission — location: [4057](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01GI5F2FS&location=4057) ^ref-25341 --- This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.* — location: [4105](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01GI5F2FS&location=4105) ^ref-64050 --- Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. — location: [4118](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01GI5F2FS&location=4118) ^ref-1970 --- memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.* — location: [4121](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01GI5F2FS&location=4121) ^ref-4673 --- 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—the meme for, say, “belief in life after death” is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.’ — location: [4123](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01GI5F2FS&location=4123) ^ref-27530 --- replicators. As soon as the primeval soup provided conditions in which molecules could make copies of themselves, the replicators themselves took over. — location: [4143](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01GI5F2FS&location=4143) ^ref-49937 --- For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time. — location: [4144](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01GI5F2FS&location=4144) ^ref-35906 --- There is a problem here concerning the nature of competition. Where there is sexual reproduction, each gene is competing particularly with its own alleles—rivals for the same chromosomal slot. Memes seem to have nothing equivalent to chromosomes, and nothing equivalent to alleles. I suppose there is a trivial sense in which many ideas can be said to have ‘opposites’. But in general memes resemble the early replicating molecules, floating chaotically free in the primeval soup, rather than modern genes in their neatly paired, chromosomal regiments. In what sense then are memes competing with each other? Should we expect them to be ‘selfish’ or ‘ruthless’, if they have no alleles? The answer is that we might, because there is a sense in which they must indulge in a kind of competition with each other. — location: [4204](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01GI5F2FS&location=4204) ^ref-50879 --- The human brain, and the body that it controls, cannot do more than one or a few things at once. If a meme is to dominate the attention of a human brain, it must do so at the expense of ‘rival’ memes. — location: [4214](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01GI5F2FS&location=4214) ^ref-47123 --- we could regard an organized church, with its architecture, rituals, laws, music, art, and written tradition, as a co-adapted stable set of mutually-assisting memes. — location: [4222](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01GI5F2FS&location=4222) ^ref-15470 --- One unique feature of man, which may or may not have evolved memically, is his capacity for conscious foresight. — location: [4275](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01GI5F2FS&location=4275) ^ref-45892 --- Selfish genes (and, if you allow the speculation of this chapter, memes too) have no foresight. They are unconscious, blind, replicators. — location: [4275](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01GI5F2FS&location=4275) ^ref-57337 --- The point I am making now is that, even if we look on the dark side and assume that individual man is fundamentally selfish, our conscious foresight—our capacity to simulate the future in imagination—could save us from the worst selfish excesses of the blind replicators. We have at least the mental equipment to foster our long-term selfish interests rather than merely our short-term selfish interests. — location: [4283](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01GI5F2FS&location=4283) ^ref-23820 --- 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. — location: [4287](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01GI5F2FS&location=4287) ^ref-54437 --- 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.* — location: [4289](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01GI5F2FS&location=4289) ^ref-26175 ---