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The Selfish Meme A Critical Reassessment Culture is a unique and fascinating aspect of the human species. How did it emerge and how does it develop? Richard Dawkins has suggested that culture evolves and that memes are the cultural replicators, subject to variation and selection in just the same way as genes are in the biological world. In this sense human culture is the product of a mindless evolutionary algorithm. Does this imply, as some have argued, that we are mere meme machines and that the conscious self is an illusion? Kate Distin’s highly readable and accessible book extends and strengthens Dawkins’s theory and presents for the first time a fully developed and