Culture is a unique and fascinating aspect of the human species. How did it emerge and how does it develop? Richard Dawkins has suggested that culture evolves and that memes are the cultural replicators, subject to variation and selection in just the same way as genes are in the biological world. In this sense human culture is the product of a mindless evolutionary algorithm. Does this imply, as some have argued, that we are mere meme machines and that the conscious self is an illusion?

My first book, The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment, extends and strengthens Dawkins's theory and presents for the first time a fully developed and workable concept of cultural DNA. I argue that culture's development can be seen both as the result of memetic evolution and as the product of human creativity. Memetic evolution is perfectly compatible with the view of humans as conscious and intelligent.

This book started life as the doctoral thesis that I wrote at Sheffield University's Philosophy Department under the supervision of George Botterill and Peter Carruthers. Before that, I read History and Philosophy of Science at Clare College, Cambridge University, where my final year dissertation, prepared under the supervision of Peter Lipton, concerned the relationship between mind and brain.

The Selfish Meme is also available in Spanish and in Chinese.

I also wrote a Foreword to the Chinese edition and a short paper about memetics.