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2026-04-14 19:57:26 UTC
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Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen on Nostr: Now here's where I'm gonna get *daring*. =D Why did Richard Dawkins push forth the ...

Now here's where I'm gonna get *daring*. =D

Why did Richard Dawkins push forth the notion of #memetics? Now you could say that he was impartially presenting a scientific hypothesis, like any great scientist offering an explanation for a previously mysterious phenomenon...except that Dawkins introduced his notion of the **meme** in a popular book with a clear political message in back of it, namely that "religion" (by which I think Dawkins now means chiefly "Islam") is nonsense which for some reason human minds are apt to copy from each other.

That's my *emotional* (not scientific) hypothesis about Dawkins's memetics, anyway: he meant the idea to be reductive and indeed pejorative. He wanted to reduce the concept of religious belief to something that he could reclassify as *disease*, as mere insensible affliction with an infectious agent.