Taking Memes Seriously
by Mark Anthony Signorelli (March 2010)
[3]
[6]
[7]
[8]
The hilarious scorn poured on Dawkins and his memes by the Australian philosopher David Stove is entirely deserved:
[9]
[15]
[19]
[21]
[23]
[24]
Once a man has convinced himself that he is receiving advice from his genes, there is of course no reason why he should not conjure up all sorts of admonitions they might warble into our subconscious:
[25]
After such inane passages as this, it really takes very little audacity for Wright to nakedly assert the link between beliefs and genes:
[26]
[33]
The conclusion to be drawn is obvious:
just as rational individuals should adopt strategies like those predicted by game theory as the least worst in any circumstances, so natural selection should design animals to behave instinctively with similar strategies.[34]
[36]
[38]
The genes of the Sisyphean combinations are probably spread throughout populations. For this reason alone, we are justified in considering the preservation of the entire gene pool as a contingent primary value until such time as an almost unimaginably greater knowledge of human heredity provides us with the option of a democratically contrived eugenics.[43]
[44]
He too perceived that cultural development necessarily assumes the transmission of acquired characteristics, which is strictly forbidden in modern evolutionary theory:
[45]
On account of such considerations, then, Gould was led to dismiss the whole notion of cultural evolution, and the link between genes and beliefs which such a notion necessarily implies:
[46]
[1]Dawkins, Richard The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976) 192.
[2] Dawkins, 195.
[3]Dawkins, 191-192.
[4]Dawkins, 192.
[5] Dawkins, n323.
[6]Dawkins, 195.
[7]Dawkins, 196.
[8]Dawkins, 192-194.
[9]Stove, David Darwinian Fairytales (New York: Encounter Books, 1995) 194-195.
[11]Dennett, 346.
[12]Dennett, 346.
[13] Dennett, 347.
[14] Dennett, 348.
[15]Dennett, 362.
[18]Darwin, Charles The Descent of Man (New York: Penguin Books, 2004) 140.
[19]Darwin, 142.
[20]Darwin, 156.
[21]Ridley, Matt, The Origins of Virtue (New York: Viking, 1996) 123.
[22]Wilson, David Sloan, Evolution for Everyone (New York: Delacorte Press, 2007) 159.
[23]D. S. Wilson, 157.
[24]Wright, Robert, The Moral Animal (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) 205.
[25]Wright, 69.
[26]Wright, 12.
[27]Wright, 56.
[28]Wright, 45.
[29]Wright, 89.
[30]Wright, 212.
[33]Ridley, 79.
[34]Ridley, 59.
[35]Wright, 88.
[36]Ridley, 79.
[37]Dawkins, 69.
[38]Kitcher, Philip, Vaulting Ambition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987) 402.
[41]Wilson, E.O. 1978, 137.
[42]Wilson, E.O. 1978, 79.
[43]Wilson, E.O. 1978, 198.
[44]Gould, Stephen Jay, Full House (New York: Harmony Books, 1996) 220.
[45]Gould, 222.
[46]Gould, 219.
To comment on this essay, please click here. To help New English Review continue to publish thought provoking essays such as this one, please click