The meme of Richard Dawkins
Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2008 9:54 pm
(The following is a response to sethbag's last post on another thread)
Social models already exist to explain how humans, as social creatures process information that they come in contact with on a daily basis. We know how and why we do this and we know how and why we either rejected it or accomodate the new knowledge into our own social/intellectual paradigm.
So I find it odd that a zoologist would jump into the fray with a "biological" model, which seems to is entirely unwarranted because he is does not offer anything new except the derrogatory imagery/analogy of a viral attack. It is almost as if Dawkins suggests that memes, the "information" that floats around through society, has the same ability to infect a host without the host's compliance. I find it utterly ridiculous to suppose people can become infected with religious ideas by simply hearing about them. It is as if Dawkins knows nothing about how humans process information.
But here is the logic of Dawkin's argument that nobody seems to want to address. If you want to refer to ideas as memes, then you also, by definition, have to admit atheism is a meme. After all, atheism can be replicated in the same exact way a "meme" of religious belief is replicated. So I ask a specific question to which neither chap nor sethbag has bothered to answer.
If meme activity needs to be compared with viral activity, then the same holds true for all self-replicating memes. Science doesn't make judgment calls. If something holds true for replicating memes, then it holds true for all of them, not just the ones we like or don't like. This is why I think Dawkins is using science as a cover for his personal agenda against religion.
Now as to your anecdotes about religious persuasion, yes, it is true that children raised in households tend to do and believe what their parents did and believed. And as such, children who are raised in a household that bashes religion, are just as likely to be anti-religious. Likewise, children raised in racists households are likely to become racists themselves. This is not news. We know how and why this happens. Even the non-experts understand this to be true. This is perfectly understood and explained using social models that have been in place and withstood the test of scrutiny for years. Now enter Richard Dawkins. Why is he trying to reinvent the wheel?
I take it that you're perfectly fine with me referring to atheism as a "mind virus"? If not, then please explain why.
You see this is what it all boils down to, and this is where McGrath catches Dawkins in his own logic. He doesn't want to admit atheism shares the same "viral" characteristics even though it is a meme by definition. So...why not if all he is really interested in is the science? Science doesn't discriminate, so why does he? I say it is because he is stepping outside his responsibility as a scientist and acting as a silly propagandist. This would explain why his critics are also atheists.
So what's wrong with the virus analogy?
Viruses are things that need to be killed. There is never any sense in which viruses serve a good purpose, yet it is an indisputabel fact that religious beliefs do serve good purposes. Just as an example, scientific studies have indicated that religious people are generally happier people. Religious societies replicate themselves whereas the more secular societies are actually moving towards nonexistence.
A more positive analogy would be brush fire. You hear politicians use this all the time. "Our message is going to catch on and we're going to sweep this country like a brush fire." Compare this to "Our message is going to infect everyone and we're going to sweep this country like a virus." The attributes are the same, but the difference is that someone is making a judgement call and decided whether the thing spreading is a good or bad thing. This is why Dawkins' polemic is just his own anti-religion bias spilling over into his "science." He pretends it is validated by science, but really all it is is his personal judgment call, which decides which memes should be considered viruses and which ones shouldn't. Surely you can see the inconsistency here.
Now as to the notion that memes are just metaphor that don't refer to physical nano-organisms that "jump from brain to brain," I think it is fair to say that Dawkins is ambiguous on this point. He says memes are ideas, but he doesn't really deny their existence as living things. Here is an excerpt from his chapter on memes in The Selfish Gene -
Dawkins doesn't confirm or deny that a meme is an actual living thing, and he seems to cite approvingly of a colleague who suggests that it is. Anothe reason to consider this is how Dawkins understands it is this. If memes are not actually "biological" things that exist in our brains, things that cannot be observed yet, then what is the point in his hypothesis at all? For me, this would be something new and revolutionary. Otherwise, why is a biologist proposing a biological model for social phenomena, that really is only biological by "analogy"? That makes little sense to me. This would be like an economist trying to explain genetic behavior using economic theory by analogy. This is why I think Dawkins is ambiguous on exactly what it is he thinks memes consist of. If they consist of matter, and they were genetic as genes, then I could see why he would presume to have a case as a biologist. Because the analogy argument is simply ridiculous by itself. That's not science.
That's fine, because the majority of scientists disregard it as pseudoscience. Most scholars can apparently see it for what it is: a gimmick. His entire thrust is evidence based on analogy. Well, heck, we can conceive of many things that replicate in the sense that it increases in numbers. That doesn't justify viral analogies in everything that replicates itself. Social trends are viruses in the same way religious beliefs are. Walmart must be a corporation virus; globalization is an economic virus; Liberalism a political virus; Mexicans a social-economic virus. I cannot be a racist for saying that last comment since Dawkins cannot be a bigot for calling religion a virus. After all, it is an analogy right?
The argument should be considered absurd on its face because viruses consist of matter, yet ideas passing through the social system (memes) do not take on ontological substance. Even though Dawkins might accept this hypothesis, there is no scientific basis for it. Thoughts are a mystery Dawkins attempts to explain biologically, but again, he falls short. Ideas "replicate" in the same way freedom replicates. The same way democracy, human rights and moral values replicate. Is morality a virus?
I'm convinced that the existence of God is self-evidence to the majority of human beings. The greatest piece of evidence, to my mind, is the human conscience. But for most theists, there is no reason to think one can "demonstrate" his existence because this presupposes a scientific method. As I said before, this would be like someone trying to translate Chinese to Spanish while using the Rosetta Stone. It doesn't apply, nor can it. And this has everything to do with the limitations of the scientific method. It does not explain why we are here, how we got here, how the mind works, what is consciousness, etc.
All of them, to the extent that they agree God exists. The religious aspect of theism is just humanity's way of trying to comprehend God and relate to his existence. Of course all of their divisions on doctrinal and ritualistic details only proves that not all of them can be completely correct. It says nothing about the existence of God.
Which theologians? Christian theologians agree for the most part on all the basics, and disagree on the minor details. In Islam, there are no theologians in the same sense, since the Muslim God is not bound by rational laws. In Islam the Koran is the only authority. That's pretty messed up for the same reasons biblical inerrantists are wrong. I see this as a religious culture's way of seeking an absolute truth and inerrant guide for living, in a world where God's gives us free will and is essentially disconnected from us all in a social sense. It is a need that was fulfilled with the invention of "inerrant" books.
I think religions in general are moving towards the same trend. They are reasoning that not all of them can be right in their ideas and explanations, and the divisions are becoming less and the bridges are becoming more frequent. Ba' hai faith is becoming a really popular faith now and I think this is because it believes that all religions are true. Universalism is becoming more popular too. Mormonism is moving towards a universalist mentality, from what I can sense. Dan Peterson says he is almost a Universalist (essentially believing that, pretty much, all humans are going to heaven) and of course the axiom that all religions have some truth seems to be gaining more acceptance, whereas the dominant mentality used to be that "no religion has any truth accept mine." I think the idea of hell is a primitive notion that got absorbed into religions by those seeking to control over the whole. It was a scare tactic and a means of conditioning and control. But belief in God is something different, and requires no belief in hell or eternal punishment, or an acceptance of any of the horrible things spoken of in the Bible.
As to your question, how to recognize which religion is 100% true, well I am not convinced one exists. But this doesn't cause a problem for me because I don't believe religion is necessary to believe God exists. I don't see a God looking down on earth with a favorable eye on his "chosen people." This was an identity mechanism put in place by the ancient Israelites, I believe. It has caught favor among some Christians and especially Mormons. I tend to believe God is no respecter of persons.
Social models already exist to explain how humans, as social creatures process information that they come in contact with on a daily basis. We know how and why we do this and we know how and why we either rejected it or accomodate the new knowledge into our own social/intellectual paradigm.
So I find it odd that a zoologist would jump into the fray with a "biological" model, which seems to is entirely unwarranted because he is does not offer anything new except the derrogatory imagery/analogy of a viral attack. It is almost as if Dawkins suggests that memes, the "information" that floats around through society, has the same ability to infect a host without the host's compliance. I find it utterly ridiculous to suppose people can become infected with religious ideas by simply hearing about them. It is as if Dawkins knows nothing about how humans process information.
But here is the logic of Dawkin's argument that nobody seems to want to address. If you want to refer to ideas as memes, then you also, by definition, have to admit atheism is a meme. After all, atheism can be replicated in the same exact way a "meme" of religious belief is replicated. So I ask a specific question to which neither chap nor sethbag has bothered to answer.
If meme activity needs to be compared with viral activity, then the same holds true for all self-replicating memes. Science doesn't make judgment calls. If something holds true for replicating memes, then it holds true for all of them, not just the ones we like or don't like. This is why I think Dawkins is using science as a cover for his personal agenda against religion.
Now as to your anecdotes about religious persuasion, yes, it is true that children raised in households tend to do and believe what their parents did and believed. And as such, children who are raised in a household that bashes religion, are just as likely to be anti-religious. Likewise, children raised in racists households are likely to become racists themselves. This is not news. We know how and why this happens. Even the non-experts understand this to be true. This is perfectly understood and explained using social models that have been in place and withstood the test of scrutiny for years. Now enter Richard Dawkins. Why is he trying to reinvent the wheel?
I take it that you're perfectly fine with me referring to atheism as a "mind virus"? If not, then please explain why.
You see this is what it all boils down to, and this is where McGrath catches Dawkins in his own logic. He doesn't want to admit atheism shares the same "viral" characteristics even though it is a meme by definition. So...why not if all he is really interested in is the science? Science doesn't discriminate, so why does he? I say it is because he is stepping outside his responsibility as a scientist and acting as a silly propagandist. This would explain why his critics are also atheists.
So what's wrong with the virus analogy?
Viruses are things that need to be killed. There is never any sense in which viruses serve a good purpose, yet it is an indisputabel fact that religious beliefs do serve good purposes. Just as an example, scientific studies have indicated that religious people are generally happier people. Religious societies replicate themselves whereas the more secular societies are actually moving towards nonexistence.
A more positive analogy would be brush fire. You hear politicians use this all the time. "Our message is going to catch on and we're going to sweep this country like a brush fire." Compare this to "Our message is going to infect everyone and we're going to sweep this country like a virus." The attributes are the same, but the difference is that someone is making a judgement call and decided whether the thing spreading is a good or bad thing. This is why Dawkins' polemic is just his own anti-religion bias spilling over into his "science." He pretends it is validated by science, but really all it is is his personal judgment call, which decides which memes should be considered viruses and which ones shouldn't. Surely you can see the inconsistency here.
Now as to the notion that memes are just metaphor that don't refer to physical nano-organisms that "jump from brain to brain," I think it is fair to say that Dawkins is ambiguous on this point. He says memes are ideas, but he doesn't really deny their existence as living things. Here is an excerpt from his chapter on memes in The Selfish Gene -
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.(3) When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.'
Dawkins doesn't confirm or deny that a meme is an actual living thing, and he seems to cite approvingly of a colleague who suggests that it is. Anothe reason to consider this is how Dawkins understands it is this. If memes are not actually "biological" things that exist in our brains, things that cannot be observed yet, then what is the point in his hypothesis at all? For me, this would be something new and revolutionary. Otherwise, why is a biologist proposing a biological model for social phenomena, that really is only biological by "analogy"? That makes little sense to me. This would be like an economist trying to explain genetic behavior using economic theory by analogy. This is why I think Dawkins is ambiguous on exactly what it is he thinks memes consist of. If they consist of matter, and they were genetic as genes, then I could see why he would presume to have a case as a biologist. Because the analogy argument is simply ridiculous by itself. That's not science.
What's kind of funny about your ranting is that you keep accusing Dawkins of supporting the idea of memes, and then you claim that this is completely insupportable by any scientific evidence. I'm not sure I agree with that assertion
That's fine, because the majority of scientists disregard it as pseudoscience. Most scholars can apparently see it for what it is: a gimmick. His entire thrust is evidence based on analogy. Well, heck, we can conceive of many things that replicate in the sense that it increases in numbers. That doesn't justify viral analogies in everything that replicates itself. Social trends are viruses in the same way religious beliefs are. Walmart must be a corporation virus; globalization is an economic virus; Liberalism a political virus; Mexicans a social-economic virus. I cannot be a racist for saying that last comment since Dawkins cannot be a bigot for calling religion a virus. After all, it is an analogy right?
The argument should be considered absurd on its face because viruses consist of matter, yet ideas passing through the social system (memes) do not take on ontological substance. Even though Dawkins might accept this hypothesis, there is no scientific basis for it. Thoughts are a mystery Dawkins attempts to explain biologically, but again, he falls short. Ideas "replicate" in the same way freedom replicates. The same way democracy, human rights and moral values replicate. Is morality a virus?
Theology is nothing more than a bunch of individual opinions on what exactly is the mind and will of God, without having demonstrated that a God even exists, much less having demonstrated why it is that their own particular description of him is accurate and true.
I'm convinced that the existence of God is self-evidence to the majority of human beings. The greatest piece of evidence, to my mind, is the human conscience. But for most theists, there is no reason to think one can "demonstrate" his existence because this presupposes a scientific method. As I said before, this would be like someone trying to translate Chinese to Spanish while using the Rosetta Stone. It doesn't apply, nor can it. And this has everything to do with the limitations of the scientific method. It does not explain why we are here, how we got here, how the mind works, what is consciousness, etc.
Kevin, please explain to me, from amongst a group containing a Catholic theologist, a Mormon theologist, a Muslim theologist, and a Buddhist theologist, whose theology is actually correct.
All of them, to the extent that they agree God exists. The religious aspect of theism is just humanity's way of trying to comprehend God and relate to his existence. Of course all of their divisions on doctrinal and ritualistic details only proves that not all of them can be completely correct. It says nothing about the existence of God.
And please explain to me, then, how you'd characterize the theology of those theologians you believe got it wrong - is it "knowledge" that they have?
Which theologians? Christian theologians agree for the most part on all the basics, and disagree on the minor details. In Islam, there are no theologians in the same sense, since the Muslim God is not bound by rational laws. In Islam the Koran is the only authority. That's pretty messed up for the same reasons biblical inerrantists are wrong. I see this as a religious culture's way of seeking an absolute truth and inerrant guide for living, in a world where God's gives us free will and is essentially disconnected from us all in a social sense. It is a need that was fulfilled with the invention of "inerrant" books.
And also, please explain how it is that we should all be able to recognize and identify which theology, from amongst all the different theologians out there, is really true, and which aren't.
I think religions in general are moving towards the same trend. They are reasoning that not all of them can be right in their ideas and explanations, and the divisions are becoming less and the bridges are becoming more frequent. Ba' hai faith is becoming a really popular faith now and I think this is because it believes that all religions are true. Universalism is becoming more popular too. Mormonism is moving towards a universalist mentality, from what I can sense. Dan Peterson says he is almost a Universalist (essentially believing that, pretty much, all humans are going to heaven) and of course the axiom that all religions have some truth seems to be gaining more acceptance, whereas the dominant mentality used to be that "no religion has any truth accept mine." I think the idea of hell is a primitive notion that got absorbed into religions by those seeking to control over the whole. It was a scare tactic and a means of conditioning and control. But belief in God is something different, and requires no belief in hell or eternal punishment, or an acceptance of any of the horrible things spoken of in the Bible.
As to your question, how to recognize which religion is 100% true, well I am not convinced one exists. But this doesn't cause a problem for me because I don't believe religion is necessary to believe God exists. I don't see a God looking down on earth with a favorable eye on his "chosen people." This was an identity mechanism put in place by the ancient Israelites, I believe. It has caught favor among some Christians and especially Mormons. I tend to believe God is no respecter of persons.