Just started reading The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore and dumping a few direct lines from the book that made my brain light up.

• We humans, because of our powers of imitation, have become just the physical ‘hosts’ needed for the memes to get around. This is how the world looks from a ‘meme’s eye view’.
• Put into Richard Dawkins’s language, if there is a replicator that makes imperfect copies of itself only some of which survive, then evolution simply must occur. This inevitability of evolution is part of what makes Darwin’s insight so clever. All you need is the right starting conditions and evolution just has to happen.
• Algorithms are also completely mindless. If a system is set up so that it follows a given procedure then it does not also need a little mind, or extra something, inside to make it work. It just must mindlessly happen.
• The complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman also likens the evolution of life to an incompressible computer algorithm. We cannot predict exactly how it will all unfold and can only ‘stand back and watch the pageant’. We can, however, ‘find deep and beautiful laws governing that unpredictable flow’
• ‘The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artefact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes’
• By contrast, modern hunter-gatherers have been estimated to spend only about fifteen hours a week hunting and have plenty of time for leisure. This is despite the fact that they have been pushed into marginal environments far poorer than those in which our ancient ancestors probably lived. Why would people the world over have given up an easier life in favor of a life of toil and drudgery?