Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently - the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs 'good tricks.'

Go ahead and believe in God , if you like, but don't imagine that you have been given any grounds for such a belief by science.

The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.

In order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. All the works of human genius can be understood in the end to be products of a cascade of generate-and-test procedures that are, at bottom, algorithmic and mindless.

Cost is always an object - the second law of thermodynamics sees to that

Some cultural phenomena bear a striking resemblance to the cells of cell biology, actively preserving themselves in their social environments, finding the nutrients they need and fending off the causes of their dissolution.

There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).