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Richard Dawkins quits atheism foundation for backing transgender ‘religion’
(www.telegraph.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2024
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I read Selfish Gene, like, a few months ago.
Congratulations on your recency bias, then, I suppose. I guess then you have also read Graham on the philosophical definitions of genes, and Jameson about memetics and neo-Darwinism research were he categorizes several criticism from the social sciences on the concept. As well as Burman, who defends the concept but also calls it an “unscientific object”. Or the analysis on the alt-right ideological ties of neo-darwimism from Weikart. I personally find the most compelling the article from Benitez Bribiesca, for I do think memetics are a dangerous idea. But the most compelling is of course the analysis from Dennett elaborating how memes, on their own fail to explain social phenomenon that should, as proposed by Dawkins, be regarded as memes, but other forms of sociological analysis can indeed account for the entirety of the phenomenon without the need of extraneous theories. This is what I think leads Mayr to claim that the theory of memes is unnecessary and there are anthropological and sociological theories better suited to explain the phenomena of concepts. Because I have read all of those and many more, too much to list here, over the course of decades. But what am I saying, you just read Selfish gene, of course no one knows more about it than you. Dear lord, my thesis tutor was right, “for the average idiot, their ignorance is as good as your PhD, no matter how much evidence you produce”.
This may be true, but it's not applicable in this conversation. Up until this comment you haven't provided any evidence or reasoning for your beliefs. You came in here frothing at the mouth attacking everyone in sight, and when people questioned you you doubled down on the hostility and lack of reasoning backing up your points by insisting it wasn't your job to educate people on the internet.
Maybe there's a lesson to be learned from your aggressive replies and general belligerence. A psychologist should be able to learn something from it.
You argued it's "the most useless idea ever committed to text", that's a bad take. No one claimed that it's a rigorous scientific theory, that's your failure to understand the premise. It's a useful analogy, like the useful observation that electricity in a circuit behaves in many ways like water in a pipe, or that Einsteinian spacetime behaves in many ways like a rubber sheet. Are these analogies "useless" because electricity isn't in fact water, and space-time is not in fact rubber? Or would a self-righteous PhD make themselves look supremely foolish by attacking these illustrative analogies as useless because they aren't rigorous scientific theories?
Having read most of your sources here, they do not support your conclusion. I see opinion pieces, confessions of the authors' personal inabilities to imagine the granularity of a singular meme, lamentations over different authors' conflicting definition of a meme, and smug conflation of memetic behavior and the substance of consciousness, but not claims that the idea is useless. Non rigorous, over extended, inconsistently defined, sure. But useless? Much less the most useless idea ever committed to text? That is your own myopic hyperbole.
Education isn't intelligence. Demonstrably. You're not clever, at all.