It is inspired by the writings of Nancy Pearcey of the Discovery Institute.
The basic premise of Nancy’s “insight” that the blogger finds worthy of spreading is the belief that since biologists believe that the brain and human thought processes are the result of evolution, they must necessarily dismiss all human thought as being equally pointless and invalid. But biologists are too stupid to realize that by doing this they are undermining their own argument—since this alleged argument of theirs is the product of a faulty human brain, it must be invalid too. In this way, they are “sawing off the branch upon which they sit.”
The blogger says:
As Mary Midgley points out, if we accept the concept of memes as Dawkins and his co-believers seek to propagate it, we must conclude that the only reason they “campaign so ardently for neo-Darwinism must be that a neo-Darwinist meme . . . has infested their brains, forcing them to act in this way.” After all, she says, “if you propose the method seriously you must apply it consistently.”
Read more at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterso ... hUuJrd2.99
This completely misunderstands what Dawkins actually says about memes. Presuming that this misunderstanding is not deliberate, I’ll offer some constructive clarification on Dawkins so that he may improve the manuscript.
First, memes don’t force anybody to do anything. The idea of memes is that certain ideas can take on a life of their own. Certain ideas spread and evolve. The ideas themselves spread based upon the survival characteristics of the ideas. If an idea tends to stick in somebody’s brain and they tend to share it with others, then the idea spreads. The ideas can mutate over time, and the mutations with the best survival characteristics are the ones that survive.
If we applied this to Mormonism, we would look at how, for example, rationalizations for the priesthood ban spread and evolved over time. Or how Mormon thought about homosexuality vs. homosexual behavior has evolved and spread. About how any idea evolves and spreads, really.
Calling an idea a “meme” in no way implies that the idea is good or bad, inisghtful or a lie, a fascinating insight into the truth, or a totally irrational superstition.
So, the concept of a meme is itself a meme. Dennett says that Dawkins was criticized pretty severely by psychologists and sociologists for his idea about memes, because, according to them, the ways ideas spread and evolve is something that they’ve been studying for decades in a body of research that Dawkins hadn’t read. Regardless, the idea of “memes” caught on and has spread.
Dawkins never said, “Since any particular religious idea ia a meme, it can be discarded as being false.” That isn’t how the concept works and is not the point. A meme isn’t a bad idea or a false idea. Rather, it is simply an idea that has the capability of spreading and evolving.
Human thought processes are subject to all sorts of cognitive bias. But that doesn’t mean that it is somehow fundamentally impossible to think rationally. Evolutionary psychology isn’t in the business of cutting down branches the way the blogger imagines.