James Gleick Quotes

In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of 'The Selfish Gene,' I did actually use the metaphor of a 'virus.' So when anybody talks about something going viral on the Internet, that is exactly what a meme is, and it looks as though the word has been appropriated for a subset of that.

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term ‘meme’ for a unit of cultural imitation.

When we think of memetic culture, it is the 'sausage factory' of the old days.

Our task is to create memes... Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate.

The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.

A meme (rhymes with dream) is a unit of information (a catchphrase, a concept, a tune, a notion of fashion, philosophy or politics) that leaps from brain to brain. Memes compete with one another for replication, and are passed down through a population much the same way genes pass through a species. Potent memes can change minds, alter behavior, catalyze collective mindshifts and transform cultures. Which is why meme warfare has become the geopolitical battle of our information age. Whoever has the memes has the power.

God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That's not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator.

The interesting question would be whether there's a Darwinian process, a kind of selection process whereby some memes are more likely to spread than others, because people like them, because they're popular, because they're catchy or whatever it might be.

I just like cliches. I like tvtropes.com. It's pretty much my bible.

Jokes spread around the world and embed themselves in our shared culture; the most resonant of them get lodged in the language in the same way as clichés or old wives' tales do.

All other species on this planet are gene machines only. They don't imitate at all well; we alone are gene machines and meme machines as well.

If I want to read something that's really giving me something serious and fundamental to think about, about the human condition, if you like, or what we're all doing here, or what's going on, then I'd rather read something by a scientist in the life sciences, like Richard Dawkins, for instance.

What I find on the Internet is fascinating because whole subcultures are developing. And they really are cultures. They have their art forms, their music, and their language. They have their spirituality, they have new names. It's almost like watching colonies of little organisms develop under a petri dish. You can really see these cultures swarming and growing and developing and spawning on the Internet.

Human beings do not carry civilization in their genes. All that we do carry in our genes are certain capacities- the capacity to learn to walk upright, to use our brains, to speak, to relate to our fellow men, to construct and use tools, to explore the universe, and to express that exploration in religion, in art, in science, in philosophy.

Imagine a world full of brains, and far more memes than can possibly find homes. Which memes are more likely to find a safe home and get passed on again?

[E]volutionists sometimes take as haughty an attitude toward the next level up the conventional ladder of disciplines: the human sciences. They decry the supposed atheoretical particularism of their anthropological colleagues and argue that all would be well if only the students of humanity regarded their subject as yet another animal and therefore yielded explanatory control to evolutionary biologists.

Beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture, they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution.

People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.

We must accept all the implications of our human inheritance, one of the most important of which is the small scope of biologically transmitted behavior, and the enormous role of the cultural process of the transmission of tradition.

Adolescents are the bearers of cultural renewal, those cycles of generation and regeneration that link our limited individual destinies with the destiny of the species.

Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry in as many minds as possible.

For our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt.

Keep Darwinian thinking out of cosmology, out of psychology, out of human culture, out of ethics, politics, and religion!

I was always fascinated with the way that things pop on the Internet - the ways you build communities and create little stories and ideas that people play around with and send back to you.