Nine Years Ago Today: Science vs. religion

David Deutsch

A battle of the memes

By Moristotle

[First published on August 26, 2011.]

A book you might like to read: The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, by David Deutsch (illustrated. 487 pp. Viking. $30—or borrow it from your local university library).
    I’ll entice you with one of the more intriguing paragraphs from David Albert’s August 12 review (“Explaining it All: How We Became the Center of the Universe”) in The New York Times:

[Deutsch] also provides an elegant analysis of two particular strategies for meme-replication, one he calls “rational” and the other he calls “anti-rational.” Rational memes—the sort that Deutsch imagines will replicate themselves well in post-Enlightenment societies—are simply good ideas: the kind that will survive rigorous scientific scrutiny, the kind that will somehow make life easier or safer or more rewarding because they tell us something useful about how the world actually works. Irrational memes—which are more interesting, and more diabolical, and which Deutsch thinks of as summing up the essential character of pre-Enlightenment societies—reproduce themselves by disabling the capacities of their hosts (by means of fear, or an anxiety to conform, or the appearance of naturalness and inevitability, or in any number of other ways) to evaluate or invent new ideas.

    That parenthetical about fear, does it remind you of anything? It reminds me of what passes for much (or at least one side) of “political discourse” in this country, with its mean-spirited, dogged anti-rationality.

Richard Dawkins

And what is a “meme” — a term coined by Richard Dawkins in his first book, The Selfish Gene (1976)?
    Alfred explains it this way:

Deutsch is interested in neo-Darwinian accounts of the evolution of culture. Such accounts treat cultural items—languages, religions, values, ideas, traditions—in much the way that Darwinian theories of biological evolution treat genes. They are called “memes,” and are treated as evolving, just as genes do, by mutation and selection, with the most successful memes being those that are the most faithfully replicated. Deutsch writes with enormous clarity and insight about how the mechanisms of mutation and transmission and selection of memes are going to have to differ, in all sorts of ways, from those of genes.

...

David Albert

The reviewer, a professor of philosophy at Columbia University and the author of Quantum Mechanics and Experience, concludes:

[Deutsch, an Israeli-British physicist at the University of Oxford,] is exactly who he is, and he is well worth getting to know, and we are very lucky indeed to have him.

Copyright © 2011, 2020 by Moristotle