http://earmarks.org/archives/2006/03/25/79 A weblog on early modern culture, teaching English literature, and what else comes to mind Mon, 01 Dec 2008 21:24:28 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.3 http://earmarks.org/archives/2006/03/25/79#comment-46566 Serendipities Sun, 08 Apr 2007 11:05:01 +0000 http://earmarks.org/archives/2006/03/25/79#comment-46566 [...] About a year ago, I read Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine and wrote about the experience. I was fascinated by this attempt by natural scientists to explain cultural change, but had some major reservations as well. Today I read parts of another book on memetics: Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science, edited by Robert Aunger, with a foreword by Daniel Dennett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).This interlibrary loan book had been sitting on my shelf for quite a while, so I decided that it was going to be Easter reading. The interesting thing about this volume is that it not only includes contributions by proponents of memetics, such as Susan Blackmore and Daniel Dennett, but also contains critical chapters. Robert Aunger writes in his introduction that the aim of the book is “to see where a reasonable consensus might fall on this spectrum of opinion regarding the utility of the meme concept.” (5) [...] [...] About a year ago, I read Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine and wrote about the experience. I was fascinated by this attempt by natural scientists to explain cultural change, but had some major reservations as well. Today I read parts of another book on memetics: Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science, edited by Robert Aunger, with a foreword by Daniel Dennett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).This interlibrary loan book had been sitting on my shelf for quite a while, so I decided that it was going to be Easter reading. The interesting thing about this volume is that it not only includes contributions by proponents of memetics, such as Susan Blackmore and Daniel Dennett, but also contains critical chapters. Robert Aunger writes in his introduction that the aim of the book is “to see where a reasonable consensus might fall on this spectrum of opinion regarding the utility of the meme concept.” (5) [...]

]]>