
Re: But will anyone buy it?
GOD defiles Reason:
What level of success do you think they'll have with these attacks using memes?That's really hard to guage. Obviously, it's had some early success along those lines -- the mere fact that the meme model has some currency in popular science is a kind of victory.
But there are too many possibilities. The meme model might eventually run up against counter-arguments that are persuasive enough to halt its development in the mainstream. A more functional biological unit for understanding cultural development, one unconnected to the anti-religious arguments, might displace it (something similar happened when a more rigorously scientific anthropology overturned the atheistic theories of Feuerbach et al). Or proponents of the meme model might realize that it has unintended logical consequences -- eg. that in addition to weakening certain arguments for religion, it also weakens certain arguments for, say, democratic society -- which makes them less willing to support the theory. Or someone within the evo-psych community mind find that the meme model can be just as reasonably used to support religion.
For that matter, the meme model might continue to develop along its current lines until it becomes as standard as, say, Mendeleyan genetics. Who knows? It's too early to tell.
That said, I do think that there are good non-polemical reasons to subject the meme model to more rational scrutiny, and there is good reason to doubt some of the assumptions that went into crafting the model. I've pointed to a lot of those in the thread on "The New Replicators", and I think that's probably the best place to continue this conversation.