Richard Dawkins & Bret Weinstein - Evolution

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I've heard about this one for a while and have been looking forward to its Youtube release.

Bret reflecting on the interview with Rebel Wisdom:

it's almost funny to what extent they ignore historical contingency. - they are thinking of people as if they were a form of genetic/memetic homo oeconomicus.
Particularly when they talk about celibacy in catholicism ... historically, families put certain offspring in monasteries, to get rid of them- and they were anything but celibate. Which the church was silently okay with, as long as the children were not legitimate and had no legal claims on any inheritance.
the catholic church had a lot of official rules that it didn't care about much in practice, because the real world works differently.
of course, at some point that changed a bit, when priesthood became more optional - at which point, I'd guess, you find a lot of people who couldn't live out their urges in public join the clergy. - from homosexuals to paedophiles. As long as it was illegal at the time.

Guess who remains as catholic priest, now?
But what I'm trying to say: the reason for becoming a priest needn't be driven either by reproductive drives, either genetic or memetic.

They sound a bit like Freud to me, who tried to explain everything through the sex drive, because it was the one thing science could agree on, and that connected his pseudo-science to biology.

That said: they are of course overall right and everything. It just isn't much of a debate, if both agree to begin with.

the language-as-a-meme example was a bit pointless, though,as a language is not only a meme complex, but a meme-gene-complex. Haven't they heard of noam chomsky?

Last edited by shlaifu on 30 Nov 2018, 4:06 pm, edited 2 times in total.

We're made up of DNA and what DNA cares about is replication. So it makes a lot of sense if you want to decipher human decision making to look for sex drive.

Yes and no.
DNA doesn't care. It's a molecule.
Evolution is survival of the survivor, and any mutation that didn't hinder survival is being passed on just like the ones that help survival.
Mutations aren't teleological, and neither is behaviour necesseraily aimed at reproductive advantage - it may be just not hindering reproduction. Or maybe it even is, and Mr. Freud's patient will die childless. In that case, sex drive may not have had any influence on the patient's decisions ever.

Surprisingly or otherwise I found a completely different set of things salient in the debate.

I think the most pervasive across the conversation was Richard's unwillingness to look at current humanity and culture as still being directly influenced by evolutionary drives, or at least he considered our social constructs so complex that he didn't feel comfortable trying to map natural reactions to these things. Bret's rebuttal I think to this was sound - ie. that so many of the atrocities of the 20th century had this as their backing and that a lot of the chaos we see now follows the same sort of format, ie. genes hijacking the moral compass of their hosts or even kicking them out of the drivers set while they get done what they want. Sure - DNA's a molecule, supposedly we're conscious and it's not, and yet we're riding on top of billions of chemical switches that we don't understand, our thoughts bubble up all day long from places we don't understand, and it's no surprise - especially thinking Brets way about it - when these dynamics sort of catch fire across populations and pogroms happen.

In that sense Bret talking to Richard about interpreting modern human interaction and political issues in terms of lineage selection and the way it went in that regard reminded me a lot of Sam Harris challenging Daniel Dennett on compatibilism, and I can't escape thinking that Dawkins holds to this view for the same reasons that Dennet holds to compatibilism - fear of what people would do if they firmly believed they had no free will, or that human behavior had very significant unconscious Darwinian drives guiding it still.

The end of the conversation also really got my attention. It seemed like Bret actually played devil's advocate, spoke in favor of a belief that he didn't have (ie. that beaver dams or ponds select for beavers), Richard came out against that one soundly - ie. beaver ponds don't procreate, they're not replicators rather they're the tool or instrument of a replicator and which point Bret indicated that this is exactly the way he sees memes - ie. that memes are tools of replicators (us) and that they have no longevity in and of themselves past their direct utility to us. That closing interaction could have been something of a cultural watershed moment because Bret couldn't have more cleverly extracted the flaw in Richard's thinking on that and then even gotten him to denounce something quite similar by analogy and the reason I'd think of that as a watershed is that it was something of an intellectual green-light, ie. for more people to think along the lines that Bret is going forward with respect to looking at, and solving, sociological problems through this lens - something that our understanding evolution probably could have been doing a few decades ago but we didn't keep up.