Thought Contagion

Released on by Aaron Lynch
preview-18

  • Thought Contagion Book Detail

  • Author : Aaron Lynch
  • Release Date : 2008-08-06
  • Publisher :
  • Genre : Philosophy
  • Pages : 210
  • ISBN 13 : 0786725648
  • File Size : 88,88 MB
DOWNLOAD BOOK

Thought Contagion by Aaron Lynch PDF Summary

Book Description: Fans of Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Bennet, and Richard Dawkins (as well as science buffs and readers of Wired Magazine) will revel in Aaron Lynch’s groundbreaking examination of memetics--the new study of how ideas and beliefs spread. What characterizes a meme is its capacity for displacing rival ideas and beliefs in an evolutionary drama that determines and changes the way people think. Exactly how do ideas spread, and what are the factors that make them genuine thought contagions? Why, for instance, do some beliefs spread throughout society, while others dwindle to extinction? What drives those intensely held beliefs that spawn ideological and political debates such as views on abortion and opinions about sex and sexuality?By drawing on examples from everyday life, Lynch develops a conceptual basis for understanding memetics. Memes evolve by natural selection in a process similar to that of Genes in evolutionary biology. What makes an idea a potent meme is how effectively it out-propagates other ideas. In memetic evolution, the "fittest ideas” are not always the truest or the most helpful, but the ones best at self replication.Thus, crash diets spread not because of lasting benefit, but by alternating episodes of dramatic weight loss and slow regain. Each sudden thinning provokes onlookers to ask, "How did you do it?” thereby manipulating them to experiment with the diet and in turn, spread it again. The faster the pounds return, the more often these people enter that disseminating phase, all of which favors outbreaks of the most pathogenic diets. Like a software virus traveling on the Internet or a flu strain passing through a city, thought contagions proliferate by programming for their own propagation. Lynch argues that certain beliefs spread like viruses and evolve like microbes, as mutant strains vie for more adherents and more hosts. In its most revolutionary aspect, memetics asks not how people accumulate ideas, but how ideas accumulate people. Readers of this intriguing theory will be amazed to discover that many popular beliefs about family, sex, politics, religion, health, and war have succeeded by their "fitness” as thought contagions.

Disclaimer: www.yourbookbest.com does not own Thought Contagion books pdf, neither created or scanned. We just provide the link that is already available on the internet, public domain and in Google Drive. If any way it violates the law or has any issues, then kindly mail us via contact us page to request the removal of the link.

Thought Contagion

Thought Contagion

File Size : 24,24 MB
Total View : 6103 Views
DOWNLOAD

Fans of Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Bennet, and Richard Dawkins (as well as science buffs and readers of Wired Magazine) will revel in Aaron Lynch’s groundbrea

Infectious Ideas

Infectious Ideas

File Size : 50,50 MB
Total View : 4043 Views
DOWNLOAD

Infectious Ideas is a comparative analysis of how Muslim and Christian scholars explained the transmission of disease in the premodern Mediterranean world. How

The Evolution of Intelligence

The Evolution of Intelligence

File Size : 87,87 MB
Total View : 969 Views
DOWNLOAD

How is one to understand the nature of intelligence? One approach is through psychometric testing, but such an approach often puts the "cart before the horse"--

Contagion

Contagion

File Size : 73,73 MB
Total View : 6843 Views
DOWNLOAD

Edgar Award Nominee for Best Young Adult Mystery Perfect for fans of Madeleine Roux, Jonathan Maberry, and horror films like 28 Days Later and Resident Evil, th

Contagion

Contagion

File Size : 9,9 MB
Total View : 9568 Views
DOWNLOAD

"Krell writes here with a brilliance of style that few other philosophers can match." —John Sallis Although the Romantic Age is usually thought of as idealizi