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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 02 Nov 2019

Taken: 01 Nov 2019

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Religion Exmplained •
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Pascal Boyer •

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Selfish gene

Selfish gene
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
As we all know, some memes may be faithfully transmitted while others are hugely distorted in the process. Consider the instance the contrasting fortunes of two cultural memes created by Richard Dawkins, one which replicated very well while the other one under when bizarre mutation. The idea of “meme” itself is an example of a meme that replicated rather well. A few years after Dawkins had introduced the notion, virtually everybody in the social sciences and in evolutionary biology or psychology knew about it and for the most part has an essentially correct notion of the original meaning. Now compare this with another of Dawkins’ ideas, that a ‘Selfish genes.” What Dawkins meant was that genes are DNA strings whose sole achievement is to replicate. The explanation for this is simply that the ones that do not have this functionality (the ones that build organisms that cannot pass on the genes) just disappear from the gene pool. So far, so simple. However, once the phrase ‘selfish gene’ diffused out into the wide world its meaning changed beyond recognition, to become in may people’s usage “a gene that makes us selfish.” An editorial in the British ‘Spectator once urged the Conservative Party to acquire more of the selfish gene that Professor Dawkins talked about.

But one does not “acquire” a gene, it makes little sense to say that someone has “more” of a gene than someone else, there is probably no such thing as a gene that makes people selfish, and Dawkins never meant that anyway. This distortion is not too surprising. It conforms the popular perception that biology is all about the struggle for survival, Nature red in tooth and claw, the Hobbesian fight of all against all, etc. (that this is in fact largely false in neither here nor there.) So the distortion happened, in this case, because people had a prior notion that the phase “selfish gene” seemed to match. The original explanation (the original meme) was completely ignored, the better to fit that prior conception. ~ Page 38/39
5 years ago. Edited 5 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Religion Explained
5 years ago.

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