The Selfish Meme

For a particularly interesting online essay, go read The Spell of the Meme (click here for a nicer pdf version). The essay is by lapsed atheist and professor of historical theology Alister McGrath, offering a pointed critique of Daniel Dennett's latest book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006). He takes Dennett to task for his rather liberal use of the problematic concept of the meme in his "natural" explanation of religion. For several interesting posts on Dennett's book, see entries at Issues in Mormon Doctrine (first entry here).

Note: I've been getting increased spam and troll comments lately, so I turned the comment queue ON for a few days. Expect short delays before your comments post publicly. On the bright side, some comment typos will now magically disappear before posting.

Comments

[Jeff G]

Here is the mp3 of that event which the paper is a transcript of. It's a little long, but well worth the time:

www.thersa.org/audio/lecture130306.mp3

[Seth R.]

Interesting speech. It's sometimes depressing to me how much I haven't read and how rich a tradition there is underlying religious thought (of which I am largely ignorant).

[Clark Goble]

Memes are my current pet peeve. I've not read Dennett's book primarily because of its reliance on memes. There are plenty of other books a bit more grounded (like Atran's In Gods We Trust) that make the same sort of claims as Dennett, albeit in a perhaps more interesting way. (Speaking from ignorance of course with the usual caveats of one who's knowledge is indirect via reviews and responses.)

[Karl Edberg]

I thought Dennett did a good job of sticking up for memetics and countering the rebuttals of the British "chap." The Brit's premise was that he doesn't even believe that memes exist, but Dennett made it explicitly clear that memes do indeed exist, especially if you believe and understand words and language. The Brit also made a number of erroneous and fallacious conclusions by making "apples to apples" comparisons between the memes behind religion and the memes behind atheism. He also seemed to assign an unecessary stigma to memes which I assume was done so only because memes prove that there has been widespread perpetuation of falsehoods like religion.