Virus of the Mind?

I’ve read a bit about this theory and it’s quite facinating.

Memes are the basic building blocks of our minds and culture, in the same way that genes are the basic building blocks of biological life.

The breakthrough in memetics is in extending Darwinian evolution to culture. There are several exciting conclusions from doing that, one of which is the ability to predict that ideas will spread not because they are “good ideas”, but because they contain “good memes” such as danger, food and sex that push our evolutionary buttons and force us to pay attention to them.

Virus of the Mind

Virus of the Mind is the first popular book devoted to the science of memetics, a controversial new field that transcends psychology, biology, anthropology, and cognitive science. Memetics is the science of memes, the invisible but very real DNA of human society.

In Virus of the Mind, Richard Brodie carefully builds on the work of scientists Richard Dawkins, Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Dennett, and others who have become fascinated with memes and their potential impact on our lives. But Brodie goes beyond science and dives into the meat of the issue: is the emergence of this new science going to have an impact on our lives like the emergence of atomic physics did in the Cold War?

Brodie would say the impact will be at least as great. While atomic bombs affect everybody’s life, viruses of the mind touch lives in a more personal and more pernicious way.

Mind viruses have already infected governments, educational systems, and inner cities, leading to some of the most pervasive and troublesome problems of society today: youth gangs, the welfare cycle, the deterioration of the public schools, and ever-growing government bureaucracy.

Viruses of the mind are not a future worry: they are here with us now and are evolving to become better and better at their job of infecting us. The recent explosion of mass media and the information superhighway has made the earth a prime breeding ground for viruses of the mind.

Will there be a mental plague? Will only some of us survive with our free will intact? Brodie weaves together science, ethics, and current events as he raises these and other very disturbing questions about memes.

You can read about Memes and Memetics here.