Books do Furnish a Life: An electrifying celebration of science writing
By Richard Dawkins
V: Counsel for the Prosecution: Interrogating Faith
In conversation with Lawrence Krauss
In conversation with Lawrence Krauss
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I'd rather have had some fresh stuff, too, but am making the best of it. Dawkins didn't say, here's a lot of my minor writings I thought people might be interested in, but he could have, because they are minor things. That hasn't meant there is little that grabs me, though, so I guess it comes down to taste whether our thumbs go up or down. I appreciate his concision, though he might be a little too concise at times and I miss his point.Mr. P wrote:While I did get some good reading suggestions out of this book, it was really annoying that I had to pay so much for it. Yeah the interviews were good. But really this is all recycled material and it would have been a bit more sporting of the old chap to just publish a reading list on his website or something.
This is certainly an odd book in the Dawkins ouevre. It's not one I would recommend, mostly because Dawkins has written so many other books that I feel would be better choices. It's also weird that it's not available in book form.Mr. P wrote:While I did get some good reading suggestions out of this book, it was really annoying that I had to pay so much for it. Yeah the interviews were good. But really this is all recycled material and it would have been a bit more sporting of the old chap to just publish a reading list on his website or something.
That is interesting. I tend to think there's much more to memetics than as a metaphor for natural selection. But maybe as a new scientific discipline there's not much to talk about yet. Susan Blackmore is probably something of an expert on the subject, but her book—The Meme Machine—was published in 2000. Since then the subject seems to have lost its momentum.DWill wrote:Just by the way, I was somewhat surprised at the absence of the word "meme" in this book. Did Dawkins never manage to work it in, in any of the occasional pieces he wrote? He was, after all, well known for a while because of that coinage, and there even appeared briefly a journal of memetics devoted to developing the new field. What happened? In the introduction to the 2005 30th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins stated, "if the meme turns out to be a scientific idea" (my italics). So has he indeed decided that the meme is not science but metaphor? That was always the way I looked at the meme, as an interesting cultural metaphor for genes.