Today
is the birthday of one of my heroes. I love authors who write about
science in a clear, easy-to-understand way—authors who are excited
about science—authors who are able to express that excitement is
such a way that it's catchy!
Richard
Dawkins does exactly these things!
Another
of my heroes who transmitted scientific knowledge and excitement in
equal measures is Carl Sagan. Sadly, Sagan died in 1996 at age 62. I
loved reading his books and still sometimes reread them, but I was on
the lookout for another author who could fill the popular-science
niche. When I read Dawkins's book Unweaving the Rainbow, I
realized that I had found a new hero. I also really like Dawkins's
book for young people, The Magic of Reality.
But
neither of those are the book that made Dawkins famous. His book The
Selfish Gene, published in 1976, became extremely popular and
even revolutionary. It has sold over a million copies and has been
translated into more than 25 languages.
You
might know that a gene is a unit of heredity, something that is
passed down from parent to child. It is a section of DNA that
determines (or helps determine) a particular trait such as eye color
or the shape of a nose.
Richard
Dawkins's book talks about evolution, not from the viewpoint of
individual animals that struggle to live and reproduce, but from the
viewpoint of genes. He is not talking about genes that make people or
animals selfish—instead, his book explains why people and some
animals are so amazingly UN-selfish. It really is an interesting and
worthwhile read, although a fairly high-level one.
From
Genes to Memes...
In
The Selfish Gene, Dawkins introduced the word meme to
mean a unit of culture. What, you may ask, is a unit of culture? It
is a song or ditty, a catchphrase or slang word, an idea or belief, a story or even a behavior that
is passed from one person to another through retelling and imitation. Memes not only
reproduce (spread through imitation), they change or evolve.
Dawkins
coined the word meme long before the internet became the
incredible “all-encompassing cultural juggernaut” that it
is today, but we now use the word most often to mean something on the internet—usually an image or video, or a type of image or
video—that spreads through "liking" and sharing. Images, websites, Facebook pages, and videos that spread far and wide in a short period of time are said to have gone viral. Here some teens discuss
such internet memes (and not too kindly!).
By
the way, there is an entire field of study now called memetics,
the study of memes. More exactly, memetics is a theory of the spread
of mental content based on the analogy of evolution.
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