Better Than Being in the Phone Book
I found something at Wikipedia. It’s quite amusing.
The entry is: Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?
“Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?” is a quotation from Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot of 1735, which has entered common use and has become associated with more recent figures.
Ah – has it? Who’s that then?
The philosopher Mary Midgley used a variation on the phrase in an article in the journal Philosophy written to counter a review praising The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, where she cuttingly said that she had “not attended to Dawkins, thinking it unnecessary to break a butterfly upon a wheel.” Dawkins replied that this statement would be “hard to match, in reputable journals, for its patronising condescension toward a fellow academic.” The name Butterflies And Wheels was then adopted by a website set up to oppose Pseudoscience, Epistemic relativism and those disciplines or schools of thought whose truth claims are prompted by the political, ideological and moral commitments of their adherents.
Why – that’s us. (By ‘us’ I mean all of us, here, reading this and occasionally writing it.) They’re talking about us – me, you, the butterflies, and the wheels. Don’t know why they didn’t make the name a hyperlink, the silly prats, but anyway – it’s fun to make a cameo appearance in an entry.
There is a link in the “external links” at the end of the Wikipedia article.
Live Philosophy ?
I think Mary Midgely may be said to have misrepresented some aspects of Dawkins, but that doesn’t prevent her being a very formidable philosopher.
The bastards. They spammed the entire month of comments. What a nasty kind of bot for someone to invent.
I’m with Don on this one and so I’m going to pick a fight. I do like this site and I agree with 90% of what is said here but I’m a little aggrieved by the attacks on Midgely (and the uncritical support for Dawkins/ Dennett).
To take an example, I think that her criticism of memes is more than justified. Memes are not self- contained entities, there is no propagation mechanism through society and there are no random mutations. In short they are nothing like genes and the analogy is false.
Random mutations;
Sunnis and Shi’ites
Catholics and Protestants
Saventh Day Adventists and Church of the Latter Day Saints
Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox
Live football and dead football (this one is a joke)
usw
What, no schisms?
How do they get to be various?
_
The problem with the whole Midgley/Dawkins thing is that she spectacularly made a prat of herself by willfully misunderstanding what Dawkins said, and doing it in a particularly bad tempered manner.
That doesn’t necessarily detract from her other work, but there is no pointin defending her continued hostility to Dawkins, which is primarily a perverse refusal to concede that she was wrong.
http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php?id=14
http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php?id=5
Re: Dawkins/Midgley
from our own JS:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=1
OK I admit that Midgley got it wrong in her interpretation. However I still maintain that she was right in the case of Memes.
I don’t understand G. Tingey’s remark on meme- groups. You can define a gene but a “meme” – let’s call it an “idea” is linked in with a whole background of other ideas which define its terms and lend it support. Ideas relate to other ideas in a mutually supporting web. Trying to define a “meme” as a unit is pretty useless.
As for random mutations- I don’t think that any of Chris whiley’s examples could be defined as “random”. All had definite deterministic causes and most of the actors thought they were making rational decisions
Of course in respect of Wikipedia ‘they’ can be ‘you’ – or in this case ‘me’ so the hot link is now (at least on 9th May anyway) inserted!
I think Midgley was attacking the reductionism she expected to find, rather than what Dawkins actually wrote. A mistake, and I’ll concede that her acknowledgement of that was grudging.
Memes were not a major part of ‘Selfish Gene’, more a suggested thought experiment which others have run with. Some, such as Dennett, have made good use of it; others less so. Thinking back, as a youngster that book gave me bloody nightmares.
However, while I am happy to dismiss with contempt some with whom I disagree – Behe and Fuller spring to mind – others need to be treated with respect. And, G Tingey, were you ever to find yourself in a debate with ‘awful so-called philosopher Midgely ‘I guarantee she would tear you a new one in less time than it takes to say ‘No God is detectable’.
Hey, thanks, ian.
Damn spammers. That’s 22 comments I have to find and delete.
MJK,
If memes are ideas then wouldn’t any type of communication be a mechanism for transfer? So, books, magazines, even radio and TV would count.
And as far as “random” mutations, how about simple misunderstanding? Even the way Midgely gets Dawkins wrong would be a mutation of his meme.
Chris,
The Sunni and Shiite example seems more like the phenotype expression of the meme, not the meme itself (to take the analogy even further).
Dave
Someone appears to have written a Wikipedia page on Ophelia Benson! I wonder how that happened.
MJK is so right. Memes don’t exist – quick, go and spread it to your friends
Cackle! Why so someone does. I wonder how that happened too. Probably the person who inserted all the Live Football links yesterday.