They have effectively created the blank slate by removing racial consciousness. Now nobody knows who they are and attempt to adopt external third party characters and manipulate their appearance as "self expression" i. e. narcissism/mirror of self and mental illness.
Really? The last guy to say this hadn't actually read his book. Then he read the chapter and admitted I was right. Can you quote from the Selfish Gene where he wasn't serious about the meme idea? E.g. somewhere where he says "obviously this idea is dumb, no way it's true ... " etc (why would he include the chapter then)?
I never said that he believed the idea was straight up nonsense. It was more of a very cautious proposition that at that point he wasn't completely sold on himself. I think he included the chapter in part to make the point that evolution works not just with DNA but also with other replicators.
"What, after all, is so special about genes? The answer is that they are replicators. The laws of physics are supposed to be true all over the accessible universe. Are there any principles of biology that are likely to have similar universal validity? When astronauts voyage to distant planets and look for life, they can expect to find creatures too strange and unearthly for us to imagine. But is there anything that must be true of all life, wherever it is found, and whatever the basis of its chemistry? If forms of life exist whose chemistry is based on silicon rather than carbon, or ammonia rather than water, if creatures are discovered that boil to death at -100 degrees centigrade, if a form of life is found that is not based on chemistry at all but on electronic reverberating circuits, will there still be any general principle that is true of all life? Obviously I do not know but, if I had to bet, I would put my money on one fundamental principle. This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.* The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity that prevails on our own planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain other conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to become the basis for an evolutionary process."
Note how he says "There *may* be others." He is very careful with his phrasing throughout this chapter. "It is possible that", "It looks as though" etc.
Other people then convinced him over the years that the idea is more important than he initially thought. See for example here:
Also in the Selfish Gene he hadn't been clear what a meme actually is. If you think a concept is important you should start with a definition. Although upon rereading the passage from The Extended Phenotype I had in mind it seems like he was just sloppy. (sry, it has been a while since I first read it).
"I was insufficiently clear about the distinction between the meme itself, as replicator, on the one hand, and its 'phenotypic effects' or 'memeproducts' on the other. A meme should be regarded as a unit of information residing in a brain (Cloak's 'i-culture'). It has a definite structure, realized in whatever physical medium the brain uses for storing information. If the brain stores information as a pattern of synaptic connections, a meme should in principle be visible under a microscope as a definite pattern of synaptic structure."
The best case for cultural evolution is from people like Joseph Henrich. There's lots of evidence for cultural evolution. Check out his books: "The Secret of Our Success" and "The WEIRDest People in the World". His approach is also compatible with evolutionary psychology (the Santa Barbara variety, not the blank slate variety) and behavioral genetics (although behavioral genetics is only tangentially relevant to his explanatory targets).
I mean I read it, but if you're going to critique cultural evolution, you should include one of the main names in cultural evolution, namely Henrich. His account of how the West evolved is pretty strong. And his explanation for how we learn crucial information is also pretty straightforward. The problem with your post is that someone who doesn't know much if anything about cultural evolution will walk away thinking it's completely garbage. And I'm certainly no blank slatist either.
No, those books are wordcel coal, he works at Fraudvard and they're from 2017 and 2020 respectively when this is about the longer history and origins of the idea. He's just verbally regurgitating the stuff I went over.
>The problem with your post is that someone who doesn't know much if anything about cultural evolution will walk away thinking it's completely garbage.
"The sociologist's fallacy is a fallacy where a correlation between a social variable (such as income) and an observable (phenotypic) characteristic (such as measured IQ or criminality) is claimed to be evidence of causality, without considering that genetics may be the explanation or a partial explanation."
"If nothing else, this example shows surprisingly high correlations between preferences of parents and children, illustrating that even in our modern, media-dominated society, social transmission is highly structured"
This is just like Corr(SES, IQ) -> exposure to low SES CAUSES low IQ.
I have always used the metapedia definition. Looks like the more original definition is specifically assuming blank slatist causation while "controlling" away differences as opposed to just assuming one variable causes the other in a correlation without considering if genetics is the 3rd factor C that causes the similarity. But the underlying meaning seems essentially the same
Yes and MSM-type 'The News' journalism is absolutely full of this kind of thing: "New research has shown that......." etc. The most annoying thing is that the kind of journos who produce this kind of nonsense would neither know nor care about the crucial difference between correlation and causation. Just like also frequently, they mix up their 'millions and their 'billions'.....just a big-sounding number will do as far as they're bothered. End of rant.
Marxists evaluate the development of culture and popular ideology as functions of the development of the social hegemony of the most powerful social class, the bourgeoisie. Capitalists' most sacred imperative is the maximization of profits. And we must keep in mind that it is the capitalist class that exercises decisive control over the mass media, the political parties, the universities, the publishing industry, etc. Capitalists utilize a significant portion of their wealth to finance the tasks of molding popular culture, so as to convince the mass of the population that this society of theirs is the best of all possible worlds. See my essay on the topic:
"Biology stayed based an ignored culture until the 1980s."?????????
They have effectively created the blank slate by removing racial consciousness. Now nobody knows who they are and attempt to adopt external third party characters and manipulate their appearance as "self expression" i. e. narcissism/mirror of self and mental illness.
While reading Dawkins I didn't get the impression that he originally wanted the meme concept to be taken too seriously.
Really? The last guy to say this hadn't actually read his book. Then he read the chapter and admitted I was right. Can you quote from the Selfish Gene where he wasn't serious about the meme idea? E.g. somewhere where he says "obviously this idea is dumb, no way it's true ... " etc (why would he include the chapter then)?
I never said that he believed the idea was straight up nonsense. It was more of a very cautious proposition that at that point he wasn't completely sold on himself. I think he included the chapter in part to make the point that evolution works not just with DNA but also with other replicators.
"What, after all, is so special about genes? The answer is that they are replicators. The laws of physics are supposed to be true all over the accessible universe. Are there any principles of biology that are likely to have similar universal validity? When astronauts voyage to distant planets and look for life, they can expect to find creatures too strange and unearthly for us to imagine. But is there anything that must be true of all life, wherever it is found, and whatever the basis of its chemistry? If forms of life exist whose chemistry is based on silicon rather than carbon, or ammonia rather than water, if creatures are discovered that boil to death at -100 degrees centigrade, if a form of life is found that is not based on chemistry at all but on electronic reverberating circuits, will there still be any general principle that is true of all life? Obviously I do not know but, if I had to bet, I would put my money on one fundamental principle. This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.* The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity that prevails on our own planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain other conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to become the basis for an evolutionary process."
Note how he says "There *may* be others." He is very careful with his phrasing throughout this chapter. "It is possible that", "It looks as though" etc.
Other people then convinced him over the years that the idea is more important than he initially thought. See for example here:
https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1102244256922640385
Also in the Selfish Gene he hadn't been clear what a meme actually is. If you think a concept is important you should start with a definition. Although upon rereading the passage from The Extended Phenotype I had in mind it seems like he was just sloppy. (sry, it has been a while since I first read it).
"I was insufficiently clear about the distinction between the meme itself, as replicator, on the one hand, and its 'phenotypic effects' or 'memeproducts' on the other. A meme should be regarded as a unit of information residing in a brain (Cloak's 'i-culture'). It has a definite structure, realized in whatever physical medium the brain uses for storing information. If the brain stores information as a pattern of synaptic connections, a meme should in principle be visible under a microscope as a definite pattern of synaptic structure."
The best case for cultural evolution is from people like Joseph Henrich. There's lots of evidence for cultural evolution. Check out his books: "The Secret of Our Success" and "The WEIRDest People in the World". His approach is also compatible with evolutionary psychology (the Santa Barbara variety, not the blank slate variety) and behavioral genetics (although behavioral genetics is only tangentially relevant to his explanatory targets).
You didn't even read the post.
I mean I read it, but if you're going to critique cultural evolution, you should include one of the main names in cultural evolution, namely Henrich. His account of how the West evolved is pretty strong. And his explanation for how we learn crucial information is also pretty straightforward. The problem with your post is that someone who doesn't know much if anything about cultural evolution will walk away thinking it's completely garbage. And I'm certainly no blank slatist either.
No, those books are wordcel coal, he works at Fraudvard and they're from 2017 and 2020 respectively when this is about the longer history and origins of the idea. He's just verbally regurgitating the stuff I went over.
>The problem with your post is that someone who doesn't know much if anything about cultural evolution will walk away thinking it's completely garbage.
Feature.
No it definitely doesn't. We have stuff like https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289613000470 and https://openpsych.net/files/papers/Piffer_2023a.pdf showing "rapid" evolution by blank slatist 1960s standards. Really it's not rapid at all we have stuff like the European Revolution from Farewell to Alms where huge chunks of the bottom of the society are not breeding and this leads to rapid shifts in genetic means.
User banned for not reading my post and being over-certain about stuff he picked up from an entirely verbal NYT best seller
Odd use of sociologist's fallacy. That's not generally what it means. https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2018/12/sociologists-fallacy-origins-of-the-term/
"The sociologist's fallacy is a fallacy where a correlation between a social variable (such as income) and an observable (phenotypic) characteristic (such as measured IQ or criminality) is claimed to be evidence of causality, without considering that genetics may be the explanation or a partial explanation."
https://en.metapedia.org/wiki/The_sociologist%27s_fallacy
"If nothing else, this example shows surprisingly high correlations between preferences of parents and children, illustrating that even in our modern, media-dominated society, social transmission is highly structured"
Corr(Parent preferences, child preferences) -> exposure to parent preferences CAUSES child preferences.
This is just like Corr(SES, IQ) -> exposure to low SES CAUSES low IQ.
I have always used the metapedia definition. Looks like the more original definition is specifically assuming blank slatist causation while "controlling" away differences as opposed to just assuming one variable causes the other in a correlation without considering if genetics is the 3rd factor C that causes the similarity. But the underlying meaning seems essentially the same
Yes and MSM-type 'The News' journalism is absolutely full of this kind of thing: "New research has shown that......." etc. The most annoying thing is that the kind of journos who produce this kind of nonsense would neither know nor care about the crucial difference between correlation and causation. Just like also frequently, they mix up their 'millions and their 'billions'.....just a big-sounding number will do as far as they're bothered. End of rant.
Marxists evaluate the development of culture and popular ideology as functions of the development of the social hegemony of the most powerful social class, the bourgeoisie. Capitalists' most sacred imperative is the maximization of profits. And we must keep in mind that it is the capitalist class that exercises decisive control over the mass media, the political parties, the universities, the publishing industry, etc. Capitalists utilize a significant portion of their wealth to finance the tasks of molding popular culture, so as to convince the mass of the population that this society of theirs is the best of all possible worlds. See my essay on the topic:
https://jmiller803.substack.com/p/the-subordination-of-the-social-sciences-e80