Susan Blackmore Quotations

In proportion to our body mass, our brain is three times as large as that of our nearest relatives. This huge organ is dangerous and painful to give birth to, expensive to build and, in a resting human, uses about 20 per cent of the body's energy even though it is just 2 per cent of the body's weight. There must be some reason for all this evolutionary expense.

For the planet's sake, I hope we have bird flu or some other thing that will reduce the population, because otherwise we're doomed.

I have not come up with anything original. It needs a better brain than mine! I have done what I can do in taking Dawkins' idea and extending it.

Parapsychology seems to be growing further away from the progress and excitement of the rest of consciousness studies.

Take male strategies for success in the world. If you've got all the advantages, if you're attractive and clever and all of that, you will generally go for very high quality females.

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.

Certainly almost everything we do and think is colored in some way by memes, but it is important to realize that not everything we experience is a meme. If I walk down the street and see a tree, the basic perception that's going on is not memetic.

If you found a mammal with feathers, then you'd know that Darwin was wrong. Well, it's rather the same with memes.

Just as the design of our bodies can be understood only in terms of natural selection, so the design of our minds can be understood only in terms of memetic selection.

Memetics provides a new approach to the evolution of language in which we apply Darwinian thinking to two replicators, not one. On this theory, memetic selection, as well as genetic selection, does the work of creating language.