Susan Blackmore studies memes: ideas that replicate themselves from brain to brain like a virus. She makes a bold new argument: Humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme, which spreads itself via technology — and invents ways to keep itself alive
A fascinating TED Talk, if we believe Susan then Darwin’s idea’s around evolution are not just applicable to biology they also apply to culture. “Memetics” is a neo-Darwinian approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme. This is the theory that, like living things, ideas or ‘memes’ – naturally vary and that the fittest ideas survive and are absorbed into a our psyche and replicated across generations. Susan argues that Earth now has three replicators – genes (the basis of life), memes (the basis of human culture) and temes (the basis of technology). Technology, through temes, she argues, is now driving us forward as a species, whether we like it or not.
You can read more about this over on Susan’s site.