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Books : Science & Nature : Popular Science : Evolution : Evolutionary Psychology

• The Meme Machine

  Susan Blackmore

  
  Habits, skills, songs, stories, ideas: humans are marvellously equipped to keep themselves and each other ceaselessly busy and it's as well, for no matter how hard we try, we humans just can't stop thinking. So, says Susan Blackmore, what if consciousness is not some esoteric genetic freebie but is itself the product of an altogether different evolutionary process?

  Once humans learned to imitate each other--that is, receive, copy and retransmit "memes"--the rest, Blackmore argues, is a foregone and somewhat chilling conclusion: we are the product of our memes just as we are the products of our genes, the trouble being that memes, like genes, care only for their own propagation. The ability to imitate each other laid us open to ideas good and bad in equal measure. These proliferated in such numbers that individuals, competing to imitate the best imitators, needed bigger and bigger brains to contain the flood. Now our heads are so big, they are barely birthable.

  Blackmore's brilliantly argued version of how humans became conscious--not to say downright troubled--demolishes some of the most intractable problems of human evolution and social biology, with flair. Hers is a book full of careful arguments and thrilling conjectures: riddled, in other words, with promising memes. --Simon Ings

  
   

• Human Evolutionary Psychology

  Louise Barrett, Robin Dunbar, John Lycett

  
  
   

• Introduction to Behavioural Ecology

  J. R. Krebs, N. B. Davies

  
  
   

• The Brain Box: Very Short Introductions

  
  
   

• The Moral Animal

  Robert Wright

  
  
   

• iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind

  Gary W. Small, Gigi Vorgan

  
  
   

• Animal Behaviour: Mechanism, Development, Ecology and Evolution

  Chris Barnard

  
  
   

• Sperm Wars: Infidelity, Sexual Conflict, and Other Bedroom Battles

  Robin Baker

  
  
   

• Human Instinct

  Robert M.L. Winston

  
  
   

• Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile

  Daniel Nettle

  
  
   

• Experimental Design for the Life Sciences

  Graeme D. Ruxton, Nick Colegrave

  
  
   

• Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God

  Linden, David J.

  
  
   

• Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind

  David Buss

  
  
   

• The Talking Ape: How Language Evolved (Studies in the Evolution of Language)

  Robbins Burling

  
  
   

• The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

  Carl Sagan

  
  
   

• Introducing Evolutionary Psychology (Introducing...)

  Dylan Evans

  
  
   

• A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness

  M Donald

  
  
   

• The Psychology of Physical Attraction

  Viren Swami, Adrian Furnham

  
  
   

• Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers (Evolution & Cognition)

  Robert Trivers

  
  
   

• Evolution and Human Behaviour: Darwinian Perspectives on Human Nature

  John Cartwright