Virus of the Mind [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Crisis of the Mind / "What a waste it is to lose one's mind or not to have a mind is very wasteful." — Dan Quayle, mutating the memes in the United Negro College Fund's motto, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." There is some good news in this book. So before I get into how mind viruses are spreading wildly throughout the world—infecting people with unwanted programming like the Michelangelo computer virus infects computers with self-destruct instructions—Til start with the good news. The good news is that the long-awaited scientific theory unifying biology, psychology, and cognitive science is here. An interdisciplinary effort by scientists in all those fields over the last 20 years or so—really back to 1859 and Charles Darwin, if you like— has produced a new science called memetics. The science of memetics is based on evolution. Darwin's theory of the evolution of species by natural selection utterly transformed the field of biology. Scientists are now applying modern evolutionary theory to the way the mind works, the way people learn and grow, and the way culture progresses. In so doing, the field of psychology will ultimately be as transformed by the scientists researching memetics as biology was by Darwin. ffii U:' m 1