RICHARD DAWKINS and the SELFISH GENES

To introduce him…we take an excerpt from his own web site :

“Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, author and outspoken atheist. He has established himself as a biological guru with the publication of books detailing and expanding upon Darwinian theory.  Wired Magazine says this "Revolutionary Evolutionist" is the first true ethologist of the gene.

Richard Dawkins has been concerned to convince the literate public that they must now take evolutionary theory seriously as the context within which to think about ourselves and the world and he strives to bring his theories to an audience of lay readers through comprehensible analogies and clear writing.
The Wall Street Journal said his "passion is supported by an awe-inspiring literary craftsmanship."

The New York Times Book Review has hailed him as a writer who "understands the issues so clearly that he forces his reader to understand them too." Among his books are The Ancestor's Tale, The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, A Devil's Chaplain,The God Delusion, and The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.”

Some of his ‘revolutionary’ quotes:

“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”

“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”

“Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.”

“Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.”

“After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.”
 

Selfish genes ...MEMES
 

( A meme is a cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one person to another by non-genetic means (as by imitation)… A meme is a delusional mind-virus which spreads by thought-contagion in the same manner as a chain letter. Many religions have a memetic component.)

An excerpt from Dawkin’s book…The  Selfish Genes….

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.  Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.  If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students.  He mentions it in his articles and his lectures.  If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. 

(When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.  )

Dawkins goes on to add:

''We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination.   We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism - something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world.  We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators."

While the academic oriented are at  ‘loggerheads’ with Darwin-Dawkin ‘meme mania’…
We tend to believe that if meme and selfish genes are there….then we DO have the power to defy them…….

…and evolve into something more than self-serving NEGOISTS !!!