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I disagree. "Genes as the unit of selection" was, at the time TSG was written, a controversial theory. Group selection was the popular viewpoint (the very temp
by IsaacL 11y ago
I disagree.
"Genes as the unit of selection" was, at the time TSG was written, a controversial theory. Group selection was the popular viewpoint (the very tempting notion that individual animals make selfless sacrifices for the herd). Dawkins meticulously showed that the contrary gene selection viewpoint was the best theory for the observed evidence - original, conceptual scientific theory at its best.
He introduced "memes" as a speculative addition at the end of the book. There's nothing wrong with speculation, and it can be a valuable tool to discover insights which later form theories, but its fundamentally different to the rigour needed to establish new scientific knowledge.
"Memes" are an interesting concept, but people take the idea too far IMO, and Dawkins was right to confine his speculations to one chapter. I'd definitely agree with a weak version of the theory - ideas which include the notion that 'spreading this idea is good', tend to spread more. (Compare Christianity and Islam versus Hinduism or Buddhism). The strong version of the theory, though, goes too far, and sees people as being entirely determined by their ideas. People have independent minds and can analyse, judge, refine and/or reject the ideas they encounter - they're not passive slaves to memes.
Sentences like: "The seemingly irreconcilable split between liberals and conservatives could be explained as the beginning of a species split resulting from this conflict, with liberals evolving a bias towards the interests of memes and conservatives biased towards the interests of genes" - once upon a time I would have said "oh wow, what an interesting possibility". Nowadays I see this kind of thinking as fundamentally vapid and lazy. Historians already knew how to analyse the spread of ideas throughout a society long before the concept of a 'meme' - Gibbon, for example, was writing about how the differences between the different sects of Christianity affected their spread, 300 years ago. (I could say something similar about social scientists, though I'm not a huge fan of modern social science for other reasons).
Saying that memes are alive, or that liberals and conservatives represent two different species, to me represents an ungrounded way of thinking, where concepts float without touching reality.
TL;DR - Dawkins achievement lies in definitively stating the case for gene selection (and writing a damn good popsci book); his concept of 'memes' is mind candy for the reddit crowd.
- lisper 11y ago> liberals and conservatives represent two different species That is most definitely NOT what I said. What I said what that it might be the beginning of a species split. It will probably take at least a few hundred thousand years for that to play itself out. And I also advanced a specific causal model: that genes and memes are competing for a common resource, namely, human bodies and the brains they contain. The human brain is the phenotype of both genes and memes (hence "nature" and "nurture") and so it is entirely plausible that they could compete with each other over this resource, and that this competition could result in a species split. Whether the split between conservative and liberal is a reflection of this or not is speculative, of course, but it's also testable. For example, you could see if political affiliation had a genetically heritable component, much like you can test if homosexuality has a genetically heritable component. Sure, this idea is pretty far out there (this is an HN comment thread, after all, not a submission to Nature) but I think "vapid" is going a little too far.