Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

You can ignore religion all you want in your studies but the minute you go public, relgious people will start telling you that you are wrong.

why? as i said before, i think dawkins advances a really insulting attitude that as an atheist he is really, really happy (happier than repressed christians for sure!). while its possible to think of the universe as some wondrous chance acccident--it makes more sense to me to think of existence as a horrible mistake.

i am an atheist myself, but i dont pretend i am happy about it. and i have to say that anyone who does is possibly being slightly less than honest with themselves. (that is, i think happiness for an atheist is found DESPITE being an atheist, not because of it)

Apart from Darwin?

- But just the fact that this behaviour apparently calls for an 'explanation' is suss - eg, is he trying to say, it can be explained in terms of selfishness? Why does he feel the necessity to do this? Why not explain genocide as a weird deviation of the altruistic impulse? Which, in some senses, it obviously often is - loyalty gone awry. etc etc - questions of perspective. But perhaps I am misunderstanding what you mean by his 'explanation'.

I think the problem with this theory, as with much of evolutionary theory, is excessive confidence. I mean no species is 'perfect' in evolutionary terms. EG birds, the monogamous mating patterns, this is not the perfect evolutionary solution. Not everything can be explained in terms of evolution because there is no perfect species.

I am unsure what you mean by perfection in species, so can't really get to grips with your second paragraph.

Evolution is an accident due to "mistakes" in the genetic copying that occurs during reproduction and that some of these mistakes manifest themselves in the phenotype allowing the organism to take advantage of the environment to the benefit of its reproductive process over other members of the same species.

The evolutionary process is always limited by environmental conditions and a change in these conditions that is too rapid for the species to adapt will result in extinction.

wobbliness is built in down at a much deeper (foamy quantum) level: precision is impossible except as a cultural convention (ie the point you decide it counts-as-perfect)

I think I see what you mean here and I think this is a really good and interesting point. But doesn't the scientists attempt to explain animal behaviour in evolutionary terms mean that they think that the failure of evolutionary theory to explain all manifestations of natural life, and especially the behaviour of animals, just reflects a failure by scientists to adequately apply evolutionary theory? I mean, they think that if they just keep struggling, evolutionary theory will eventually explain every behaviour. But the problem with that is that the species haven't evolved perfectly. So do you see what I mean? Even if evolutionary theory could be perfectly applied, there would still be some instances where animal behaviour wasn't explained by it because in these instances, the animal itself just isn't genetically capable of perfect evolutionary behaviour. And since evolutionary theory will never be perfectly applied because that would be a process that approaches conclusion at infinity or whatever, I don't know how to explain that better, we will always be in the situation where, when an animal's behaviour isn't explained by evolutionary theory, we don't know whether it's because we haven't applied the theory correctly or whether it's because that animal has failed to behave in an evolutionarily perfect way.

Basically I think this is probably a really stupid point but maybe someone could just explain to me why.

The selfish gene idea is a very clever gimmick. Like a photographic negative, it doesn't actually add any new details to the picture, but it still gives the impression of being starkly and startlingly different from the original.

That can be a useful trick, in that by swapping the foreground and background, and making light what was dark, it emphasizes their unity and interchangeability. But once you've seen the trick, you have all of it. It doesn't tend to lead anywhere or suggest anything new. But it does teach you to shift emphasis more fluidly from genes to organisms and back again.

The concept of memes is a somewhat better trick, but the jury is out on it. Memes are not useful as science, but as a new metaphor. New metaphors can be very powerful catalysts for new thoughts. When Newton published his physical laws he indirectly gave birth to the metaphor of a clockwork universe. That new metaphor excited people and led to a lot of intellectual ferment and invention. In many ways Newton's laws catalyzed the Enlightenment. Darwin's theory altered our view of the universe almost as much, by placing us squarely in the animal kingdom.

Memes are Dawkins's bid to change our metaphorical view of human culture. Rather than have us be the wise creators and manipulators of ideas, he would locate the genesis of ideas in random variation and turn humans into their unwitting vessels. So far, he has not succeeded, but it is still early on in the game.

If I had to guess, I'd say that in 25 years the concept of memes will be a quaint relict of the past that only a few speicalists and crackpots have ever heard of. The problem has been that, as a metaphor, meme theory has not opened any paths of thought we want to follow and develop. We can't seem to wring any value out of it. Maybe that will come later.

As for the anti-christ thing, that's long odds.

Originality may not be the point though - writing a clear and persuasive summary of the status quo that is accessible to the general reader, particularly given the unfashionable nature of some of the "social science" implications, is an achievement that deserves a fair bit of kudos in its own right. Dawkins is frequently credited with ideas that are not his, but he has never claimed they were, and it is unfair that he is sometimes rubbished on the grounds that some of the ideas his over-enthusiastic fans credit him with are not his own.

I do think that Dawkins is on VERY shaky ground with his current notion that as conscious beings we can transcend our genes though. Where can the motives for such transcendence originate?

Are you talking about something other than what he said in The Selfish Gene? That our genetic code just predisposes us to certain behaviours, but that the human brain is such a powerful and flexible organ that we use it for things it didn't adapt to do? Like wear condoms. I don't think that's such a controversial, mystical notion.

I don't know what circles you move in, but I'd say this meme metaphor has been manna from heaven to people in the following categories:

PRs, style scouts, cool hunters, trend analysts, colour consultants, fashion designers, record labels, advertising people, journalists, cultural studies academics, consultants, marketers, market researchers, architects, designers, authors who write about 'the tipping point', 'power laws', or the 'winner takes all society', spinmeisters, political advisors...

In fact, the concept of the meme is a godsend -- sorry, genesend -- to anyone who wants to find (seemingly) rational ways to explain irrational human buying behaviour. As our postmodern capitalist economies skew more and more to the flow of information and services instead of raw materials and heavy industry, with faster and faster product cycles, these people -- the oracles and astrologers of consumerism, the hieratic keepers of its mysteries -- become more and more central to our economy.

This weekend I will show a Levi's 'cool scout' from LA around Berlin. I will take her to the launch of a new fashion store which will only survive its first year if its meme predictions are relatively accurate. I will show her a few of the places I think are 'meme labs', spicing or engineering new cultural ideas. (I won't call them that, of course. I'll just say 'Something interesting is going on here.')

The other thing I have to do this weekend is sit down and write an article commissioned by a NY style mag about the commodification of style. Now, whether or not I refer explicitly to Dawkins and 'memes' in the article, or with the scout, it seems clear that we're earning our living in a field which has the idea of the meme -- whatever you want to call it -- right at its centre. I don't see this going away any time soon, and while I don't see it becoming a more exact science, I do see it wanting to try. That's why, for people in our line of work, the meme is itself... a powerful meme. Because divining with tea leaves and crows' gizzards just doesn't seem to impress the client any more.

It depends what kind of hole you're using that argument to dig yourself out of. He is using it to say that gene theory isn't as determinist/mechanistic as it may appear. I don't think that works. A genetic predisposition can manifest itself in behaviour that, at least on the surface, doesn't appear to maximise the survival prospects of a particular individual's genes (self-sacrifice for the community, homosexuality, birth control yadda yadda). None of this indicates that behaviour isn't determined by genetic predisposition as modified by a particular environment. If you are going to suggest that the humans can defeat genetic predisposition by, say, consciously becoming more altruistic you run into a host of logistical problems, viz:

- where does the motivation to do that come from if not genetic predisposition interacting with a particular environment?
- if it is not an efficient strategy in terms of maximising genetic survival possibilities, won't it be selected out?

His arguments don't strike me as mystical but do they have the intellectual rigour you'd expect from a noted scientist. Of course it may be that a altruism's time has come, in that the human environment has tilted so that, relatively speaking, altruism has become a more efficient strategy than it once was. But you don't need to explain that in terms of humanity transcending its genetic inheritance.

'Interacting' being the key word. You can't unbake a cake (sorry if that's a cliché). The interaction produces behaviours that wouldn't have led the genes to propagate in the first place.

the imperative to fuck remains, and i dont think we can transcend that, for instance.

Tell that to a monk.