r/neoliberal • u/ghhewh Anne Applebaum • Aug 11 '24

Richard Dawkins lied about the Algerian boxer, then lied about Facebook censoring him Opinion article (non-US)

https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/richard-dawkins-lied-about-the-algerian

631 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

u/ja734 Paul Krugman Aug 11 '24 edited Aug 11 '24

He literally invented the concept of memes. If you think that wasnt a pivotal moment sociology then youre not a srrious person.

-3

u/BBlasdel Norman Borlaug Aug 11 '24

He gave memes a name, and described them in a punchier and simpler way for lay people, but didn't invent that concept either. The task of being a public intellectual that he performed with occasional brilliance decades ago, but is failing at horrifically here, is his whole thing. There is no notable scientific career underneath it. Many might hate him for being an atheist, but I hate him for being a petty bigot whose remarkable ability to talk about 'genes' while using many mutually incompatible definitions for the term has held back genetics, we are not the same.

17

u/ja734 Paul Krugman Aug 11 '24

I call bullshit. Articulating a concept in a concise enough way to assign a single term to it constitutes the vast majority of the legwork of inventing it. If youre going to argue that someone else should get the credit for it then say who and why you think so.

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u/ToInfinity_MinusOne World's Poorest WSJ Subscriber Aug 12 '24

Bro what are you even talking about??

12

u/ToInfinity_MinusOne World's Poorest WSJ Subscriber Aug 11 '24

Who invented memes before Dawkins? He literally coined the term in The Selfish Gene. And meme isn’t even something he pursued seriously. It’s not really relevant to evolutionary biology now. He largely abandoned it.

2

u/MaxChaplin Aug 11 '24

Is memetics an established science with successful predictions? My impression is that it's somewhere between a metaphor and folk psychology.

10

u/ToInfinity_MinusOne World's Poorest WSJ Subscriber Aug 12 '24

Memes was something that Dawkins coined in the hopes of making a direct comparison in cultural progression to evolutionary progression. He wanted to show information spread through a society in similar ways to genes. And that a zeitgeist functioned similarly to natural selection/evolution.

However, specialists in other fields like anthropology and psychology showed that culture and information does not operate under the same mechanisms as evolution and so Dawkins abandoned the term and idea. Now people just used as a term for "cultural trend".