It was not until 1971 that the authority for defining scientific units, the General Conference of Weights and Measures got around to defining the unit that is the basis of chemistry (the mole, or the quantity of something). Yet for all this tardiness in putting the chemical sciences on a sound quantitative basis, chemistry is an old and venerable subject and one naturally asks the question, why? Well, the truth is that up until the mid-1920s, many physicists did not believe in the reality of molecules. Indeed, it was not until after the physics community had accepted Ernest Rutherford's 1913 solar-system-like model of the atom, and the quantum mechanical model of the coupling of electron spins in atoms that physicists started to take seriously the necessity of explaining the chemical changes that chemists had been observing, investigating and recording since the days of the alchemists.
From biology to culture to the new new economy, the buzzword on everyone's lips is "meme." How do animals learn things? How does human culture evolve? How does viral marketing work? The answer to these disparate questions and even to what is the nature of thought itself is, simply, the meme. For decades researchers have been convinced that memes were The Next Big Thing for the understanding of society and ourselves. But no one has so far been able to define what they are. Until now. Here, for the first time, Robert Aunger outlines what a meme physically is, how memes originated, how they developed, and how they have made our brains into their survival systems. They are thoughts. They are parasites. They are in control. A meme is a distinct pattern of electrical charges in a node in our brains that reproduces a thousand times faster than a bacterium. Memes have found ways to leap from one brain to another. A number of them are being replicated in your brain as you read this paragraph. In 1976 the biologist Richard Dawkins suggested that all animals -- including humans -- are puppets and that genes hold the strings. That is, we are robots serving as life support for the genes that control us. And all they want to do is replicate themselves. But then, we do lots of things that don't seem to help genes replicate. We decide not to have children, we waste our time doing dangerous things like mountain climbing, or boring things like reading, or stupid things like smoking that don't seem to help genes get copied into the next generation. We do all sorts of cultural things for reasons that don't seem to have anything to do with genes. Fashions in sports, books, clothes, ideas, politics, lifestyles come and go and give our lives meaning, so how can we be gene robots? Dawkins recognized that something else was going on. We communicate with one another and we get ideas, and these ideas seem to have a life of their own. Maybe there was something called memes that were like thought genes. Maybe our bodies were gene robots and our minds were meme robots. That would mean that what we think is not the result of our own creativity, but rather the result of the evolutionary flow of memes as they wash through us. What is the biological reality of an idea with a life of its own? What is a thought gene? It's a meme. And no one before Robert Aunger has established what it physically must be. This elegant, paradigm-shifting analysis identifies how memes replicate in our brains, how they evolved, and how they use artifacts like books and photographs and advertisements to get from one brain to another. Destined to inflame arguments about free will, open doors to new ways of sharing our thoughts, and provide a revolutionary explanation of consciousness, The Electric Meme will change the way each of us thinks about our minds, our cultures, and our daily choices.
This book, with contributions emanating from the 21st World Congress of Psychosomatic Medicine held in Seoul in August 2011, presents the latest evidence-based information about the mechanisms, assessment, and management of psychosomatic disorders from a biopsychosociocultural perspective. Somatization is a process characterized by excessive or inappropriate focus on physical symptoms that are medically unexplained. It is highly prevalent in primary care medicine, as somatoform (psychosomatic) disorders tend to be chronic and can cause significant personal suffering and social problems as well as financial burden.
What is the nature of reality? Where did we come from? Is there a God? What is the point of life? Give your brain a shake and take on a radically new understanding of your world by joining author Sean Sinjin as he fills in the gaps in our contemporary understanding of everything from physics to religion, from the universe's birth to its death, and how to find happiness in the midst of all this seeming chaos. Meme pits science agains the supernatural in a final battle that can only end with the truth. Intentionally written with the layperson in mind, the entertaining analogies, diagrams, and clearly stated concepts construct a complete and purpose-filled perspective on what reality really is. An open mind and heart are the only prerequisites__but be warned, the concepts introduced herein can be quite overwhelming and may change your life forever. Come to http: //www.BetterHuman.org for excerpts from Meme.
What can economics, the natural and the social sciences learn from each other in better understanding complex forms of change? How far can models, methodologies or metaphors that have been used successfully in one disciplinary field be 'exported' and meaningfully applied to other fields? Distinguished researchers from across the globe assess, in a rare example of successful cross-disciplinary engagement, the explanatory power of chaos theory, new evolutionary theory, path dependency, neo-institutional economics, multiple modernities and historical institutionalism. The book provides an exciting panorama of state of the art thinking and new avenues to combining the power of various traditions of thought.
God’s war crimes, Aristotle’s sneaky tricks, Einstein’s pajamas, information theory’s blind spot, Stephen Wolfram’s new kind of science, and six monkeys at six typewriters getting it wrong. What do these have to do with the birth of a universe and with your need for meaning? Everything, as you’re about to see. How does the cosmos do something it has long been thought only gods could achieve? How does an inanimate universe generate stunning new forms and unbelievable new powers without a creator? How does the cosmos create? That’s the central question of this book, which finds clues in strange places. Why A does not equal A. Why one plus one does not equal two. How the Greeks used kickballs to reinvent the universe. And the reason that Polish-born Benoît Mandelbrot—the father of fractal geometry—rebelled against his uncle. You’ll take a scientific expedition into the secret heart of a cosmos you’ve never seen. Not just any cosmos. An electrifyingly inventive cosmos. An obsessive-compulsive cosmos. A driven, ambitious cosmos. A cosmos of colossal shocks. A cosmos of screaming, stunning surprise. A cosmos that breaks five of science’s most sacred laws. Yes, five. And you’ll be rewarded with author Howard Bloom’s provocative new theory of the beginning, middle, and end of the universe—the Bloom toroidal model, also known as the big bagel theory—which explains two of the biggest mysteries in physics: dark energy and why, if antimatter and matter are created in equal amounts, there is so little antimatter in this universe. Called "truly awesome" by Nobel Prize–winner Dudley Herschbach, The God Problem will pull you in with the irresistible attraction of a black hole and spit you out again enlightened with the force of a big bang. Be prepared to have your mind blown. From the Hardcover edition.
Synthetic biology encompasses a variety of different approaches, methodologies and disciplines, and many different definitions exist. This Volume of Methods in Enzymology has been split into 2 Parts and covers topics such as Measuring and Engineering Central Dogma Processes, Mathematical and Computational Methods and Next-Generation DNA Assembly and Manipulation. - Encompasses a variety of different approaches, methodologies and disciplines - Split into 2 parts and covers topics such as measuring and engineering central dogma processes, mathematical and computational methods and next-generation DNA assembly and manipulation
Synthetic biology encompasses a variety of different approaches, methodologies and disciplines and many different definitions exist. This volume covers topics such as measuring and engineering central dogma processes, mathematical and computational methods and next-generation DNA assembly and manipulation.
What produces mental illness: genes, environment, both,neither? The answer can be found in memes—replicable units of information linking genes and environment in the memory and in culture—whose effects on individual brain development can be benign or toxic. This book reconceptualizes mental disorders as products of stressful gene-meme interactions and introduces a biopsychosocial template for meme-based diagnosis and treatment. A range of therapeutic modalities, both broad-spectrum (meditation) and specific(cognitive-behavioral), for countering negative memes and their replication are considered, as are possibilities for memetic prevention strategies. In this book, the author outlines the roles of genes and memes in the evolution of the human brain; elucidates the creation, storage, and evolution of memes within individual brains; examines culture as a carrier and supplier of memes to the individual; provides examples of gene-meme interactions that can result in anxiety, depression, and other disorders; proposes a multiaxial gene-meme model for diagnosing mental illness; identifies areas of meme-based prevention for at-risk children; and defines specific syndromes in terms of memetic symptoms, genetic/ memetic development, and meme-based treatment.
