The idea of the meme was invented by Richard Dawkins and hammered into its most robust form by Daniel Dennett. It is an extended analogy that claims that human ideas are somehow like genes and have their own process of evolution independent of the evolution going on in their "hosts", the human race. It's an attractive idea and it works well as a rhetorical device, especially the way that Dawkins and Dennett use it to attack religion as an infection of the brain. True believers in "memetics" claim that all of human thought is "infection" by memes - a strong claim that memetics is a fundamental explanation of mind. Memeticists claim that the brain is a "meme machine". The problem comes when you try to apply memes outside of the examples trotted out by the "founders". Personally, I can't figure out what a "meme" is. The old words of ideas, doctrines, theories and especially paradigm seem perfectly serviceable and don'...

There is one place in our field of vision where we are blind , due to the "Rube Goldberg" design of our eyes. Octopuses have better eyes (presumably "designed" by a more skilful God, but don't get me started). Even though there is a patch of our retina devoted to passing the optical nerve through the retina, we don't "see" the hole. Our brains paint it over with what "ought" to be there. We are born with another huge blind spot. We have a full, 360 degree view of the world, in which we are free to explore and move around, but at the very centre is a hollow hole. We seem to be peering out of the hole but cannot see inside. We know that what is really inside this hole is 3 pounds of gooey meat that is somehow responsible for everything we see, but, just like the optic nerve that penetrates our retina, this bundle of nerves thoroughly hides its presence. We are all like this, all looking out from hollow heads. It is incredibly difficult to s...