What is this thing called the Internet? Ever since its advent the philosophers and analysts have been attempting to get a handle on what cyberspace really means to humankind.

One such great attempt, and lauded by myself previously in this space, is by James J O'Donnell, as set out in his book Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace.

Briefly, O'Donnell tracks how the written word has been transformed from words on papyrus, to page, to digital and to the concept of 'virtual library'.

He argued that a virtual library as a repository for human knowledge must be created in a community where information is decentralised, not ordered in the model of a codex, as books are.

Now along comes Susan Blackmore, a psychologist, who has written a very puzzling but intriguing article which seems to have transposed the concepts outlined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene to cyberspace.

Dawkins took evolutionary natural selection to the gene and to describe human behaviour better, made the analogy that the function of humans is to carry and replicate genes.

He was using the 'selfish gene' as an analogy for describing how they work to replicate themselves rather than humans so as to understand our behaviour.

In the same way he also used the term 'meme' as a means of describing human cultural evolution and information transfer across generations in terms similar to that of the gene.

Blackmore's article in The Stone section of the New York Times (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com) outlines how with cyberspace we are on to the 'third replicator'.

The first replicator is the gene. The second is the meme. Humans are good imitators and "let loose a new evolutionary process" based on memes.

Knowledge is passed on and people use it to build new knowledge and products to where we are now, the third replicator, which she calls "temes".

"They are digital information stored, copied, varied and selected by machines. We humans like to think we are the designers, creators and controllers of this newly emerging world but really we are stepping stones from one replicator to the next," she writes.

In other words, the machines take over. What are these machines? They are the computers that "handle vast quantities of information with extraordinarily high-fidelity copying and storage".

She points to examples of computer programmes recombining old texts, information, data, and images to create new versions. They are also the search engines like Google, which combining various bits of information with each new search.

"We humans like to think we are the designers, creators and controllers of this newly emerging world but really we are stepping stones from one replicator to the next," she says boldly, an assertion which probably led to the mass of comments from the blogosphere.

In response to claims that she was just a "trippy visionary" and a "pink hair meme", Blackmore wrote a response in which she expanded on the concept.

"It's not the Internet per se that is so different, but the advent of machines that can carry out all of the three processes required for evolution: copying, varying and selecting," she writes. "Out there among all the computers interlinked around the world are, I suggest, the beginnings of such machines.

"This is what will bring about, or already has brought about, the birth of the third replicator."

It is kind of a scary concept, the machines using our information. Or is it information replicating itself using the machines, if one wants to use the analogy?

Whether you agree or not about the emergence of the third replicator, her aim is to question whether thinking about words and stories and technologies as a new replicator has any value. She says yes.

Others say no. It's a good article, even though I am suspicious of the concept. What do you think?

Send any comments to elamin.ahmed@gmail.com