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Richard Dawkins quits atheism foundation for backing transgender ‘religion’
(www.telegraph.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2024
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As a fellow psychologist, I must regretfully state that this is the stupidest thing ever written by a psychologist. Our entire science is built upon the notion that feelings indeed create and modify (social) reality*. Sex is not gender, and he fumbled the most basic differentiation of concepts.
Heteronormative gender roles, on the other hand, are categorically a form of ideology and to defend them in place of basic human decency is a disgrace, good riddance to both asshats, I say. Specially with such a tenous biological argument that any good biologist can tell you is patently false. Gametes are not binary, there are hundred of thousands of intersex individuals for which this narrow definition doesn't apply.
Grant is absolutely right, but I don't expect the mentally weak asshole who invented the word "meme" to ever understand social sciences. His book is a pathetic pseudo scientific intrusion in a field he doesn't understand in the slightest.
*: some philosophers would even argue that there's no reality but social reality and both are one and the same.
Dawkins isn't a psychologist afaict. I had to check.
He isn't which is why I called him intrusist there at the end for writing a book about psychology and neurology which he doesn't understand. But the quote is from Coyne, another biologist who wrote the reply and was supported by Pinker, who is a psychologist and should've known better. None of these people know what they're talking about and are acting in this whole thing from passion instead of reason and evidence. Which is ironic, I believe.
He coined the word to mean a thought or idea that spreads through a population. Internet memes are completely unrelated to his usage. It's not like he created the first insanity wolf meme or something.
Yes, and it is the most useless concept ever committed to text. It's ironic it was coopted by internet culture and then ridiculed and reduced to absurdity.
He just tried to poorly rebrand the concepts of cultural imagery, and social constructs but with less evidence. It's akin to me going "I propose the term garggle, it is water that flows down by gravity following the contours of the solid ground". It's like, yeah, we call it water and when it does that we call it a river, you would know if you opened a book about it anytime in the past century. You could summarize that book as "better read a book on sociology, it's more useful".
Nah, this is a bad take. Memes are a sociological analog to genetic genes. They're units of cultural information that mutate, recombine, and evolve in the cultural space the same way genes mutate, recombine, and evolve in the gene pool. It's a poignant observation about the behavior of viral cultural concepts that transcends merely describing their existence. The parallel to genetic behavior is a useful observation that, to my knowledge, was not really acknowledged before he coined the term.
It was acknowledged before he coined it. He just summed it up better than people had previously. From Wikipedia:
What Dawkins did was make the concept more analogous to a gene than a virus, but it's basically the same idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
The difference between a gene and a virus is method of reproduction. The genetic model, I think, is considerably more apt than the viral. Memes combine with other memes, they have memetically distinct "offspring". I think even that distinction is useful.
It is useful, I agree. I'm just saying the idea was already around. He definitely refined it and improved upon it though.
Memetics in action.
Good point!
I can accept there's people who like the concept but there's a reason it didn't take hold anywhere except pop science and is a theoretical dead end. It has a ton of epistemological flaws that make it useless as a scientific construct. It is unfalsifiable and it provides no venues for theoretical or experimental developments. As I stated, there are far more useful constructs in sociology and social psychology that allows the analysis of social constructs, cultural imagery, beliefs, values, worldviews, etc. With over a century of epistemological, theoretical and methodological traditions that have provided useful advancements to our scientific understanding, and provided tools for further development. Memes are barely a fun simile with genes that was cool to make YouTube videos about ten years ago, but that's about it.
Hard disagree. I don't think you actually understand the premise.
I don't think you have ever read the premise beyond the cliffsnotes. But it is not my job to educate strangers on the internet.
Take the L buddy💀🙏
I read Selfish Gene, like, a few months ago.
Congratulations on your recency bias, then, I suppose. I guess then you have also read Graham on the philosophical definitions of genes, and Jameson about memetics and neo-Darwinism research were he categorizes several criticism from the social sciences on the concept. As well as Burman, who defends the concept but also calls it an “unscientific object”. Or the analysis on the alt-right ideological ties of neo-darwimism from Weikart. I personally find the most compelling the article from Benitez Bribiesca, for I do think memetics are a dangerous idea. But the most compelling is of course the analysis from Dennett elaborating how memes, on their own fail to explain social phenomenon that should, as proposed by Dawkins, be regarded as memes, but other forms of sociological analysis can indeed account for the entirety of the phenomenon without the need of extraneous theories. This is what I think leads Mayr to claim that the theory of memes is unnecessary and there are anthropological and sociological theories better suited to explain the phenomena of concepts. Because I have read all of those and many more, too much to list here, over the course of decades. But what am I saying, you just read Selfish gene, of course no one knows more about it than you. Dear lord, my thesis tutor was right, “for the average idiot, their ignorance is as good as your PhD, no matter how much evidence you produce”.
This may be true, but it's not applicable in this conversation. Up until this comment you haven't provided any evidence or reasoning for your beliefs. You came in here frothing at the mouth attacking everyone in sight, and when people questioned you you doubled down on the hostility and lack of reasoning backing up your points by insisting it wasn't your job to educate people on the internet.
Maybe there's a lesson to be learned from your aggressive replies and general belligerence. A psychologist should be able to learn something from it.
You argued it's "the most useless idea ever committed to text", that's a bad take. No one claimed that it's a rigorous scientific theory, that's your failure to understand the premise. It's a useful analogy, like the useful observation that electricity in a circuit behaves in many ways like water in a pipe, or that Einsteinian spacetime behaves in many ways like a rubber sheet. Are these analogies "useless" because electricity isn't in fact water, and space-time is not in fact rubber? Or would a self-righteous PhD make themselves look supremely foolish by attacking these illustrative analogies as useless because they aren't rigorous scientific theories?
Having read most of your sources here, they do not support your conclusion. I see opinion pieces, confessions of the authors' personal inabilities to imagine the granularity of a singular meme, lamentations over different authors' conflicting definition of a meme, and smug conflation of memetic behavior and the substance of consciousness, but not claims that the idea is useless. Non rigorous, over extended, inconsistently defined, sure. But useless? Much less the most useless idea ever committed to text? That is your own myopic hyperbole.
Education isn't intelligence. Demonstrably. You're not clever, at all.
This conflates material reality and ideology, though. Not to say a cultural or social reality isn't real in its own way, just that it is preceded by objective, material reality. I think the arguments tend to boil down to people prioritising one or the other and then refusing to budge.
I'm pretty laid back about it but draw the line at people attempting to assert there is no such thing as material conditions. I'm not explicitly "Marxist" but definitely Marxian in the sense that I think all theories need to be anchored in material reality in the first instance. So gender categories exist, but are part of the superstructure.
This is where I'm at. Got banned over on r/atheism for presenting a similar sentiment.
Fuck r/atheism. It's a cesspool of circlejerkers not ready to engage with crtitical thinking.
Eternal September is a bitch.
The moment humans had enough brain power to form and ideologies, they stated influencing material reality. Ideology as a concept therefore also precedes part of material reality.
In other words: The idea of gender expression has influenced human selection, therefore it's part of our current gene pool, just like sexuality. (Because gender is what sexual attraction can have preference for, not karyotype)
That's why we say the base precedes the superstructure "in the first instance".
Some politicians would argue that social reality is oppressive and must be replaced with social unreality - http://soulism.net/