“Why should sex be changeable while other physical traits cannot? Feelings don’t create reality,” he wrote. “Instead, in biology ‘sex’ is traditionally defined by the size and mobility of reproductive cells.
“It is not ‘transphobic’ to accept the biological reality of binary sex and to reject concepts based on ideology. One should never have to choose between scientific reality and trans rights.”
As a fellow psychologist, I must regretfully state that this is the stupidest thing ever written by a psychologist. Our entire science is built upon the notion that feelings indeed create and modify (social) reality*. Sex is not gender, and he fumbled the most basic differentiation of concepts.
Heteronormative gender roles, on the other hand, are categorically a form of ideology and to defend them in place of basic human decency is a disgrace, good riddance to both asshats, I say. Specially with such a tenous biological argument that any good biologist can tell you is patently false. Gametes are not binary, there are hundred of thousands of intersex individuals for which this narrow definition doesn’t apply.
Grant is absolutely right, but I don’t expect the mentally weak asshole who invented the word “meme” to ever understand social sciences. His book is a pathetic pseudo scientific intrusion in a field he doesn’t understand in the slightest.
*: some philosophers would even argue that there’s no reality but social reality and both are one and the same.
He isn’t which is why I called him intrusist there at the end for writing a book about psychology and neurology which he doesn’t understand. But the quote is from Coyne, another biologist who wrote the reply and was supported by Pinker, who is a psychologist and should’ve known better. None of these people know what they’re talking about and are acting in this whole thing from passion instead of reason and evidence. Which is ironic, I believe.
mentally weak asshole who invented the word “meme”
He coined the word to mean a thought or idea that spreads through a population. Internet memes are completely unrelated to his usage. It’s not like he created the first insanity wolf meme or something.
Yes, and it is the most useless concept ever committed to text. It’s ironic it was coopted by internet culture and then ridiculed and reduced to absurdity.
He just tried to poorly rebrand the concepts of cultural imagery, and social constructs but with less evidence. It’s akin to me going “I propose the term garggle, it is water that flows down by gravity following the contours of the solid ground”. It’s like, yeah, we call it water and when it does that we call it a river, you would know if you opened a book about it anytime in the past century. You could summarize that book as “better read a book on sociology, it’s more useful”.
Nah, this is a bad take. Memes are a sociological analog to genetic genes. They’re units of cultural information that mutate, recombine, and evolve in the cultural space the same way genes mutate, recombine, and evolve in the gene pool. It’s a poignant observation about the behavior of viral cultural concepts that transcends merely describing their existence. The parallel to genetic behavior is a useful observation that, to my knowledge, was not really acknowledged before he coined the term.
It was acknowledged before he coined it. He just summed it up better than people had previously. From Wikipedia:
The idea of language as a virus had already been introduced by William S. Burroughs as early as 1962 in his novel The Ticket That Exploded, and continued in The Electronic Revolution, published in 1970 in The Job.
The foundation of memetics in its full modern incarnation was launched by Douglas Rushkoff’s Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture in 1995,[15] and was accelerated with the publication in 1996 of two more books by authors outside the academic mainstream: Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by former Microsoft executive turned motivational speaker and professional poker-player Richard Brodie, and Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society by Aaron Lynch, a mathematician and philosopher who worked for many years as an engineer at Fermilab. Lynch claimed to have conceived his theory totally independently of any contact with academics in the cultural evolutionary sphere, and apparently was not aware of The Selfish Gene until his book was very close to publication.
What Dawkins did was make the concept more analogous to a gene than a virus, but it’s basically the same idea.
The difference between a gene and a virus is method of reproduction. The genetic model, I think, is considerably more apt than the viral. Memes combine with other memes, they have memetically distinct “offspring”. I think even that distinction is useful.
I can accept there’s people who like the concept but there’s a reason it didn’t take hold anywhere except pop science and is a theoretical dead end. It has a ton of epistemological flaws that make it useless as a scientific construct. It is unfalsifiable and it provides no venues for theoretical or experimental developments. As I stated, there are far more useful constructs in sociology and social psychology that allows the analysis of social constructs, cultural imagery, beliefs, values, worldviews, etc. With over a century of epistemological, theoretical and methodological traditions that have provided useful advancements to our scientific understanding, and provided tools for further development. Memes are barely a fun simile with genes that was cool to make YouTube videos about ten years ago, but that’s about it.
Congratulations on your recency bias, then, I suppose. I guess then you have also read Graham on the philosophical definitions of genes, and Jameson about memetics and neo-Darwinism research were he categorizes several criticism from the social sciences on the concept. As well as Burman, who defends the concept but also calls it an “unscientific object”. Or the analysis on the alt-right ideological ties of neo-darwimism from Weikart. I personally find the most compelling the article from Benitez Bribiesca, for I do think memetics are a dangerous idea. But the most compelling is of course the analysis from Dennett elaborating how memes, on their own fail to explain social phenomenon that should, as proposed by Dawkins, be regarded as memes, but other forms of sociological analysis can indeed account for the entirety of the phenomenon without the need of extraneous theories. This is what I think leads Mayr to claim that the theory of memes is unnecessary and there are anthropological and sociological theories better suited to explain the phenomena of concepts. Because I have read all of those and many more, too much to list here, over the course of decades. But what am I saying, you just read Selfish gene, of course no one knows more about it than you. Dear lord, my thesis tutor was right, “for the average idiot, their ignorance is as good as your PhD, no matter how much evidence you produce”.
This conflates material reality and ideology, though. Not to say a cultural or social reality isn’t real in its own way, just that it is preceded by objective, material reality. I think the arguments tend to boil down to people prioritising one or the other and then refusing to budge.
I’m pretty laid back about it but draw the line at people attempting to assert there is no such thing as material conditions. I’m not explicitly “Marxist” but definitely Marxian in the sense that I think all theories need to be anchored in material reality in the first instance. So gender categories exist, but are part of the superstructure.
The moment humans had enough brain power to form and ideologies, they stated influencing material reality. Ideology as a concept therefore also precedes part of material reality.
In other words: The idea of gender expression has influenced human selection, therefore it’s part of our current gene pool, just like sexuality. (Because gender is what sexual attraction can have preference for, not karyotype)
As a fellow psychologist, I must regretfully state that this is the stupidest thing ever written by a psychologist. Our entire science is built upon the notion that feelings indeed create and modify (social) reality*. Sex is not gender, and he fumbled the most basic differentiation of concepts.
Heteronormative gender roles, on the other hand, are categorically a form of ideology and to defend them in place of basic human decency is a disgrace, good riddance to both asshats, I say. Specially with such a tenous biological argument that any good biologist can tell you is patently false. Gametes are not binary, there are hundred of thousands of intersex individuals for which this narrow definition doesn’t apply.
Grant is absolutely right, but I don’t expect the mentally weak asshole who invented the word “meme” to ever understand social sciences. His book is a pathetic pseudo scientific intrusion in a field he doesn’t understand in the slightest.
*: some philosophers would even argue that there’s no reality but social reality and both are one and the same.
Dawkins isn’t a psychologist afaict. I had to check.
He isn’t which is why I called him intrusist there at the end for writing a book about psychology and neurology which he doesn’t understand. But the quote is from Coyne, another biologist who wrote the reply and was supported by Pinker, who is a psychologist and should’ve known better. None of these people know what they’re talking about and are acting in this whole thing from passion instead of reason and evidence. Which is ironic, I believe.
He coined the word to mean a thought or idea that spreads through a population. Internet memes are completely unrelated to his usage. It’s not like he created the first insanity wolf meme or something.
Yes, and it is the most useless concept ever committed to text. It’s ironic it was coopted by internet culture and then ridiculed and reduced to absurdity.
He just tried to poorly rebrand the concepts of cultural imagery, and social constructs but with less evidence. It’s akin to me going “I propose the term garggle, it is water that flows down by gravity following the contours of the solid ground”. It’s like, yeah, we call it water and when it does that we call it a river, you would know if you opened a book about it anytime in the past century. You could summarize that book as “better read a book on sociology, it’s more useful”.
Nah, this is a bad take. Memes are a sociological analog to genetic genes. They’re units of cultural information that mutate, recombine, and evolve in the cultural space the same way genes mutate, recombine, and evolve in the gene pool. It’s a poignant observation about the behavior of viral cultural concepts that transcends merely describing their existence. The parallel to genetic behavior is a useful observation that, to my knowledge, was not really acknowledged before he coined the term.
It was acknowledged before he coined it. He just summed it up better than people had previously. From Wikipedia:
What Dawkins did was make the concept more analogous to a gene than a virus, but it’s basically the same idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
The difference between a gene and a virus is method of reproduction. The genetic model, I think, is considerably more apt than the viral. Memes combine with other memes, they have memetically distinct “offspring”. I think even that distinction is useful.
It is useful, I agree. I’m just saying the idea was already around. He definitely refined it and improved upon it though.
Memetics in action.
Good point!
I can accept there’s people who like the concept but there’s a reason it didn’t take hold anywhere except pop science and is a theoretical dead end. It has a ton of epistemological flaws that make it useless as a scientific construct. It is unfalsifiable and it provides no venues for theoretical or experimental developments. As I stated, there are far more useful constructs in sociology and social psychology that allows the analysis of social constructs, cultural imagery, beliefs, values, worldviews, etc. With over a century of epistemological, theoretical and methodological traditions that have provided useful advancements to our scientific understanding, and provided tools for further development. Memes are barely a fun simile with genes that was cool to make YouTube videos about ten years ago, but that’s about it.
Hard disagree. I don’t think you actually understand the premise.
I don’t think you have ever read the premise beyond the cliffsnotes. But it is not my job to educate strangers on the internet.
Take the L buddy💀🙏
I read Selfish Gene, like, a few months ago.
Congratulations on your recency bias, then, I suppose. I guess then you have also read Graham on the philosophical definitions of genes, and Jameson about memetics and neo-Darwinism research were he categorizes several criticism from the social sciences on the concept. As well as Burman, who defends the concept but also calls it an “unscientific object”. Or the analysis on the alt-right ideological ties of neo-darwimism from Weikart. I personally find the most compelling the article from Benitez Bribiesca, for I do think memetics are a dangerous idea. But the most compelling is of course the analysis from Dennett elaborating how memes, on their own fail to explain social phenomenon that should, as proposed by Dawkins, be regarded as memes, but other forms of sociological analysis can indeed account for the entirety of the phenomenon without the need of extraneous theories. This is what I think leads Mayr to claim that the theory of memes is unnecessary and there are anthropological and sociological theories better suited to explain the phenomena of concepts. Because I have read all of those and many more, too much to list here, over the course of decades. But what am I saying, you just read Selfish gene, of course no one knows more about it than you. Dear lord, my thesis tutor was right, “for the average idiot, their ignorance is as good as your PhD, no matter how much evidence you produce”.
This conflates material reality and ideology, though. Not to say a cultural or social reality isn’t real in its own way, just that it is preceded by objective, material reality. I think the arguments tend to boil down to people prioritising one or the other and then refusing to budge.
I’m pretty laid back about it but draw the line at people attempting to assert there is no such thing as material conditions. I’m not explicitly “Marxist” but definitely Marxian in the sense that I think all theories need to be anchored in material reality in the first instance. So gender categories exist, but are part of the superstructure.
This is where I’m at. Got banned over on r/atheism for presenting a similar sentiment.
Fuck r/atheism. It’s a cesspool of circlejerkers not ready to engage with crtitical thinking.
Eternal September is a bitch.
The moment humans had enough brain power to form and ideologies, they stated influencing material reality. Ideology as a concept therefore also precedes part of material reality.
In other words: The idea of gender expression has influenced human selection, therefore it’s part of our current gene pool, just like sexuality. (Because gender is what sexual attraction can have preference for, not karyotype)
That’s why we say the base precedes the superstructure “in the first instance”.
Some politicians would argue that social reality is oppressive and must be replaced with social unreality - http://soulism.net/