Harvard Club of San Antonio

YOU ARE INVITED!

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• Sunday, September 10, 2023, from 12:00 PM to 2:00 PM.  We usually meet on the first Sunday afternoon of each month, but we’re meeting on the second Sunday afternoon of any month that includes Labor Day.
• Panera Bread at 999 E. Basse Road, San Antonio, TX 78209.  Panera Bread has counter-service featuring sandwiches, flat bread pizza, soups, salads, bagels, and pastries.  They offer self-serve soda, lemonade, iced tea, coffee, and tea.  We’re free to have lunch or dessert.  They encourage people to hang out.  We’ll try to snag the large, rectangular table that easily seats eight.
• We’ll take turns choosing books for the following month’s meeting.  I am recommending light fiction or non-fiction that will fit into our busy lives.  Let’s pick books that everybody will want to read, or at least books that nobody will not want to read.
• This month’s book is “The Meme Machine” by Susan Blackmore is available from Amazon in Audible audiobook, Audio CD, Kindle, hardcover, and paperback form.
• Please let us know you will attend, procure and read the book, be ready to calmly discuss “do we have ideas or do ideas have us?”, and be ready to suggest another book for us to read.

The Internet hijacked the word “memes” to mean a photograph with a humorous caption.  The original meaning was to suggest that it might be illuminating to think of ideas as organisms that live in our minds, that reproduce in other minds when we share them, that combine with other ideas, that even mutate in transmission like a game of Telephone.
 

The back cover of the book has this description:

“Humans are extraordinary creatures, with the unique ability to imitate, and so to copy from one another ideas, habits, skills, behaviours, inventions, songs, and stories.  These are all memes, a term first coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene.  Memes, like genes, are replicators, competing to find space in our minds and cultures, and this enthralling book investigates the consequences.  Confronting the deepest questions, from why humans have such big brains and language, to altruism, sex, and the Internet.  Susan Blackmore makes a compelling case for the theory that even our inner conscious self and our sense of free will are illusions created by the memes for the sake of their own replication.’