Disinfect Your Mind

The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think by Robert Aunger

Oh, my… First, the author indulgently recognises Dawkins for introducing the term “meme”. Then he dismisses the rest of the authors on the topic as “irresponsible”. And the next thing you see are the following pearls of Aunger’s wisdon:

Socially transmitted information is central to the nature of culture. But when it is transmitted, is it replicated?

Huh? Ok, maybe it’s just an awkward wording. Let’s read more…

“… information has often been seen as a magical, protean kind of thing…”

Mr. Aunger, artists, poets, and other artistic public may indulge themselves in such comparisons, but if you are pretending to do the science, information is a negative binary logarithm of the event’s probability, that’s it.

I = - lg2 ( P )

Again, he is anthropologist, not a mathematician. Some articstic license may be, probably, ok. Reading on. Here is the killer:

…aptly called replicator dynamic. This dynamic underlies all evolutionary processes and can be described mathematically as a generalized catalytic reaction.” End quote.

Here my Ph.D. in Mathematics and Computer Science finally made me to put his book down. Ouch, ouch, ouch… Yakk!

Richard Dawkins was a zoologist. In his book “Selfish Gene” he was talking about something he new very well - genes. He coined the word meme as a distraction and an interesting observation. In contrast, Aunger is an anthropologist, and he is devoting the whole book to the subject, he seems to have no clue about…

Don’t waste your time on this book, it’s not worth it. Better read “Virus of the mind” by Richard Brodie Granted, he has some problems of his own, but at least, after many years at Microsoft, he knows what information is and this is what memes are made from.