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Review of Susan Blackmore The Meme Machine 1 The Meme Machine - by Susan Blackmore xx + 264pp, Oxford University Press, $25.00 Matthew Elton, University of Stirling, January 2001. For Minds and Machines. On the one hand Darwin and the science that follows him has shown us that we, human beings, are animals. On the other hand, there are many categorical differences between us and all other animals. We speak to one another, cajole, persuade, entertain, build bridges and aeroplanes, wonder about the origins of the universe and ourselves, make love without making babies. And while there are echoes of all these distinctively human traits in other animals, they are faint. Susan Blackmore asks what is it that makes human beings so very different. Conventional Darwinism can point only to genetic evolution. But, she argues, once a species acquires the ability to imitate, the space is created for an extension to conventional Darwinism. The essence of this extension is the claim that not only are genes differentially propagated but also ‘memes’, that is behavioural traits that can be acquired and transmitted through the process of imitation. Before I discuss Blackmore’s proposed extension, it is worth noting that there is plenty of scope within conventional Darwinism for categorical differences between species. Some animals fly and some do not. Yes, there are borderline cases, but for all that there are many more cases of animals that very definitely do fly and animals that very definitely do not. We have, then, a categorical difference. And the Darwinian explanations are familiar, e.g. the adaptation of traits originally serving some other function, temperature regulation perhaps, that just happen to give some marginal flying or gliding capacity. In this way we can see that conventional Darwinism, for all its