Richard Dawkins Was Right!

[n2doc]

By Steve Davis | December 9th 2009 01:43 AM

It’s all true! He was right! He was totally, hopelessly wrong about selfish genes, but he was right about memes. Well…he was a little bit right. He was wrong to equate the evolution of memes to the evolution of organisms, meme evolution being Lamarckian in character. But he was right to point out the potential capacity for memes (i.e cultural concepts) to prevent logical thought in the minds of their hosts. To ‘colonise’ those minds as Fred Phillips puts it. Dawkins likes to use religion to illustrate this point, but I prefer his own pet theory of selfish genes.

Selfish gene theory was so successful in being accepted by the scientific community that even those who now dispute its significance and actively promote alternative views are held captive by its underlying themes. D.S. Wilson is a case in point. At The Huffington Post he has presented a great series of articles titled Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection which undermine the gene-only view of evolution (in quite provocative style at times) and present the argument for multi-level selection. Here’s an extract from his latest (15th) article. See if you can spot the influence of selfish gene theory.

In Truth and Reconciliation XIV, I showed that prejudice against group selection is impervious to evidence from laboratory experiments. It is also impervious to evidence from the wild. (The prejudice against group selection shows us that selfish gene theory is a classic meme, as it prevents consideration of alternative positions. SD) He continued;
I will focus on one of many examples that can be provided. In 1995, Robert Heinsohn and Craig Packer published an important paper on territorial defense in lions in the journal Science. As good experimental field biologists, they had played recordings of lions from neighboring territories to observe how females of the focal territory responded. They discovered that the same individuals consistently arrived first at the scene while others consistently lagged behind. There seemed to be bravehearts and cowardly lions within the same pride.


more:
http://www.scientificblogging.com/gadfly/richard_dawkins_was_right

[paulsby]

1. very interesting and informative thx nt

[bananas]

2. pseudoscience

List of topics characterized as pseudoscience

# Memetics is an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept that units of information, or "memes", have an independent existence, are self-replicating, and are subject to selective evolution through environmental forces.<58> Starting from a proposition put forward in the writings of Richard Dawkins, it has since turned into a new area of study, one that looks at the self-replicating units of culture. It has been proposed that just as memes are analogous to genes, memetics is analogous to genetics. Memetics has been deemed a pseudoscience on several fronts.<58> Its proponents' assertions have been labeled "untested, unsupported or incorrect"<58><59><60>