"One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That's not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator"
About this Quote
Her pivot to “replicator” matters because it’s the sturdier, more abstract idea. A replicator is anything that makes copies of itself with enough fidelity to persist, enough variation to evolve, and enough competition to spread. Memes don’t need to behave like genes; they just need to reproduce through minds, media systems, and social incentives. The subtext is methodological: stop litigating whether a meme is a discrete “unit” or how “accurate” the gene parallel is, and start tracking the actual copying process - who repeats it, how platforms amplify it, what emotional buttons it presses, how it mutates to fit new hosts.
Contextually, this is a corrective to the 1990s-2000s memetics boom, when Dawkins’s catchy coinage got oversimplified into a pseudo-genetic model of culture. Blackmore isn’t abandoning the evolutionary frame; she’s tightening it, insisting that culture’s engine is replication, not a one-to-one correspondence with biology’s most famous replicator.
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| Topic | Science |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Blackmore, Susan. (2026, January 16). One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That's not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/one-of-the-biggest-mistakes-that-people-make-when-118445/
Chicago Style
Blackmore, Susan. "One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That's not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/one-of-the-biggest-mistakes-that-people-make-when-118445/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That's not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/one-of-the-biggest-mistakes-that-people-make-when-118445/. Accessed 2 Mar. 2026.
