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
637 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/BBlasdel Norman Borlaug Aug 11 '24

Dawkins is indeed one of the most influential evolutionary biologists in the history of the field, though there are an awful lot since Darwin who could be said to have had bigger influences from Delbrück, to Gould, to Wilson. However, that influence did not come from original research or original ideas. The Selfish Gene concept that made him famous came from George C. Williams)'s book Adaptation and Natural Selection and the work of  W. D. Hamilton. 

That work has also been increasingly irrelevant to genetics over the last four decades along with the classical genetics that it revolutionized as genetics has moved on to molecular and genomic perspectives that it has only very limited relevance to. The 'gene' as Dawkins sees it can only coherently exist as a purely abstract mathematical concept, a unit of inheritance, divorced from the chemical realities of life. However, we have known since the 80s that inheritance does not come in units.

9

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.

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.

9

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".