Articles on Memetics, Including: Daniel Dennett, Hugo de Garis, the Selfish Gene, Viruses of the Mind, Susan Blackmore, Meme Pool, Viral Marketing, Opinion Leadership, Ideosphere, Hundredth Monkey Effect, Diffusion of Innovations

by Hephaestus Books

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Hephaestus Books represents a new publishing paradigm, allowing disparate content sources to be curated into cohesive, relevant, and informative books. To date, this content has been curated from Wikipedia articles and images under Creative Commons licensing, although as Hephaestus Books continues to increase in scope and dimension, more licensed and public domain content is being added. We believe books such as this represent a new and exciting lexicon in the sharing of human knowledge. This particular book is a collaboration focused on Memetics.More info: Memetics is a theory of mental content based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution, which was originated by Richard Dawkins in the 1976 book The Selfish Gene. It purports to be an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. A meme, analogous to a gene, is an idea, belief, pattern of behaviour (etc.) which is "hosted" in one or more individual minds, and which can reproduce itself from mind to mind. Thus what would otherwise be regarded as one individual influencing another to adopt a belief is seen memetically as a meme reproducing itself. As with genetics, particularly under Dawkins's interpretation, a meme's success may be due its contribution to the effectiveness of its host (i.e., a the meme is a useful, beneficial idea), or may be "selfish," in which case it could be considered a "virus of the mind." Memetics is notable for sidestepping the traditional concern with the truth of ideas and beliefs.

128 pages, Paperback

First published September 13, 2011

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Hephaestus Books publishes print-on-demand compilations of Wikipedia articles -- not original works.

"Hephaestus Books represents a new publishing paradigm, allowing disparate content sources to be curated into cohesive, relevant, and informative books. To date, this content has been curated from Wikipedia articles and images under Creative Commons licensing, although as Hephaestus Books continues to increase in scope and dimension, more licensed and public domain content is being added. We believe books such as this represent a new and exciting lexicon in the sharing of human knowledge."