Synopsis:
- Genes want to live forever
- "Replicator" vs "vehicle"
- A replicator is a repository of information that is preserved over time and spread over space
- The body is a vehicle
- The body is a machine for copying genes
- What survives is not my body but my genes
- Meme: the cultural counterpart of the gene (ideas)
- A meme is the unit of cultural evolution, just like a gene is the unit of biological evolution
- Ideas exhibit variation (copying with mistakes) and selection (pruning mistakes)
- When a meme enters a mind, it parasitically alters the mind's process so that a new goal of the mind is to propagate the meme to other minds
- Just like genes use bodies as vehicles to spread, so memes use minds as vehicles to spread
- The mind as a machine for copying memes, just like
- Memes have created the mind, not the other way around
- Just like it is genes that drive evolution, it is memes that drive thought
- The "extended phenotype" includes the world an organism interacts with
- The organism alone does not have biological relevance
- What makes sense is an open system made of the organism and its neighbors
- The control of an organism is never complete inside and null outside: there is a continuum of degrees of control, which allows partiality of control inside (e.g., Parasites operate on the nervous system of their hosts) and an extension of control outside (as in the cobweb)
- The very genome of a cell can be viewed as a representation of the environment in the cell
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