Darwin's meme: or the origin of culture by means of natural selection
Out of context: Reply #74
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I like Phillip Johnson's perspective:
"In this reductionist world ideas are not good or bad, ugly or beautiful. They differ only in "infectivity," which is the capacity to induce brains to copy them. The notion that the poetry of Keats is "sublime" is itself merely a meme which increases copying by brains whose governing memes have produced a taste for things with a reputation for sublimity. Bad poems or ideas are as likely to be successful in this sense as good ones--indeed, "good" and "bad" are meaningless terms for a memetic reductionist. Dawkins himself insists that some of the most effective replicators are "viruses of the mind," meaning religions (especially Christianity), which he despises. The only criterion of success for a meme or a gene is frequency of reproduction.
Why would poets and artists--or any group of thinking people who value the mind--be attracted to a philosophy that is so tailor-made to encourage murderous barbarians? And why should they believe that gene/meme reductionism has any foundation in fact? The ultimate irony is that this philosophy implies that Darwinism itself is just another meme, competing in the infectivity sweepstakes by attaching itself to that seductive word "science." Dawkins ceaselessly urges us to be rational, but be does so in the name of a philosophy that implies that no such thing as rationality exists because our thoughts are at the mercy of our genes and memes."