Oh boy, chew on this comment on my YouTube channel:
@Toytime-TVI Got you PZ…It goes like Yah, Darwin noticed adaptation and developed an expansive theory to encompass his study of that progress in an attempt to understand the nature and origin of creation because the vastness of his theory held millennia of time spans causing him see patterns and repetition throughout the ages, which caused him to then develop the theory of memetics, which sir truly is the language of the divine as it can only be understood over long periods of study, causing one to MUST believe in an Originator of the system of sequences he had uncovered. Most of your smartest people throughout all of time held the belief of a creator, even if they loosened the ideology and imagery. You can believe too PZ, being a smart man like you denotes, you must.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmgYIzpSGgk
Don’t bother with the included link: it’s just an old one-eyed man dancing. No real content.
This is somehow a reply to my video in which I said that evolution wasn’t simply made up by some guy, Darwin. The comment starts out OK, saying that Darwin developed a theory to explain what he observed in nature…but then they go on to say that Darwin invented memetics (not true, you can blame Dawkins for that one), and that it is a divine language and that you MUST believe it originated in a creator. I think we’ve all heard that before. Then they tell us that the smartest people throughout all of time held the belief of a creator
, and concludes with a little flattery that being a smart man
I must also believe.
I guess I’m not as smart as @Toytime believes, because that is a load of horseshit.
I think we need a serious review of the concept of “smart.” Having lots of brain power does not make one’s ideas correct.
But, but, the xtian’s evil skyfairy created Everything, even tiktok! (sarcasmus maximus)
Welcome to xtianity, where the beliefs flow like open sewers and the average I.Q. is two digits.
PZ, sounds like that person confused memitics with emetics. What they wrote would make me want to vomit.
OOPS. stumble fingered me, meant memetics not memitics.
stick to mimetids
Most of your smartest people throughout all time did not believe in relativity or quantum mechanics, because those theories hadn’t been proposed yet.
By my own lights I would argue Emile Durkheim was a proponent of socifacts, which fit into his lofty sui generis view of sociological phenomena. Ernst Haeckel’s student Richard Semon coined both engrams (for memory units) and the mneme concept for a somewhat Lamarckian organic memory with ontogenic and phylogenic components. Some cultural anthropologist David Bidney came up with a triad of artifacts, mentifacts, and socifacts which Darwinian new synthesis guy Julian Huxley drew upon when he developed the Teilhard inspired concept of noogenetics…a definite forerunner of “memetics” (barf).
Dawkins coined “meme” as a largely uninformed afterthought in The Selfish Gene. This sadly, due largely to his overhyped cult of personality, resulted in a cottage industry of hyperdarwinized cultural phenomena. In the 90s several works by proponents like Richard Brodie, Aaron Lynch, and Susan Blackmore popularized memetics with varying degrees of seriousness (Brodie went on Oprah), but this was the zenith as the “field”all but evaporated in the mid 2000s and the concept would be co-opted by LOLcats and later social media image/text combos (eg the grid featuring Anakin and Padme).
Good riddance I say and wouldn’t saddle poor old Darwin with responsibility for what Dawkins ignorantly foisted upon us. Uberdarwinist Ernst Mayr settled it by noting the meme was just a fancy word for concept.
Mementos! The fresh-maker!
Recursive Rabbit @8
The thing about mementos is they are a suppository and are digested in reverse, emerging from your mouth with fresher breath. The known side effects are an obsession with factoid tattoos and some guy named John G.
A misleading and therefore unfair claim. It was quantified to ‘most’, so it’s quote-mining.
“Most of your smartest people throughout all of time held the belief of a creator…”
Most dumb people, too.
Argumentum ad populum doesn’t make it true.
[meta]
larpar, my techniques are subtler, but more penetrating.
I mean, sure, I could list lots of informal fallacies.
But I can also subvert and confuse, by warping their framing.
For example, ‘Sure. The smartest of the smartest, no-so-much’.
Or, ‘Sure. And as the smartest are a minority, so are the smartest of the smartest’.
See? Recursive inversion, category in the first example, quantifier in the second.
There’s a guy running to replace Angie Craig in MN CD-02 who keeps spamming me texts that start with how I am so much smarter than him, then immediately pivots to how awesome he is with his Ph.Ds, inventions, and being CEOs of various places.
He was up there on my list of people to vote for, not so much anymore. Don’t pander me for my vote.
@12
[ meta]
Nobody cares.
Dr. Myers, there have been times when I wanted to suggest to you that you just admit that a Creator did it all, if only to stop these messages. But then they would start arguing for a specific Creator (invariably the Christian one, be it Orthodox, Southern Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, etc.), and it would start up all over again with you one step behind.
larpar, that you respond to me shows you care; an inadvertent but performative contradiction.
(What, you thought I cared whether you cared? ;)
[meta]
Triggered. My work is done.
This is misleading. No surprise.
.1. Up until recently, being an atheist was a death penalty offense.
It can and would get you burned at the stake in Europe in some times and places.
It still is in some countries today.
.2. In times past, humans didn’t have scientific explanations for the world around them.
At that time, the hypothesis of creator gods wasn’t unreasonable.
Ancient humans also believed in the Flat Earth, the demon theory of disease, the seed theory of conception, and many other beliefs that turned out to be wrong.
Just discovering that blood circulates in a closed loop in the body was a major discovery.
As time passes, we have learned more and more about the Real World and discarded ancient guesses for scientific facts and theories.
That the smart guys in the room believed in gods in the long ago past, is irrelevant today.