This is an old revision of this page, as edited by NBeale (talk | contribs) at 08:12, 3 December 2006 (change "first" to within a year of their original publication., and correct that year to 1992 with ref). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Revision as of 08:12, 3 December 2006 by NBeale (talk | contribs) (change "first" to within a year of their original publication., and correct that year to 1992 with ref)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)"Viruses of the Mind" (1992) is a controversial essay by Richard Dawkins using memetics, epidemiology, and an analogy with biological and computer viruses to analyse the propagation of religious beliefs. In the essay, Dawkins defines the "symptoms" of being infected by the "virus of religion", providing examples for most of them, and tries to define a connection between the elements of religion and its survival value (invoking Zahavi's handicap principle of sexual selection, applied to believers of a religion).
The second part of Dawkins' television programme The Root of All Evil? explored similar ideas and took a similar name, The Virus of Faith.
The essay is included in the book A Devil's Chaplain, and originated the term "faith-sufferer."
The claims that "God" and "Faith" are viruses of the mind was analysed at length within a year of their original publication in John Bowker's 1992-3 Gresham College lectures, written in collaboration with the Psychiatrist Quinton Deeley. He suggests that this "account of religious motivation...is...far removed from evidence and data." and that, even if the God-meme approach were valid , "it does not give rise to one set of consequences... Out of the many behaviours it produces, why are we required to isolate only those that might be regarded as diseased? And who ... decides, and on what grounds, what is diseased? ... there is nothing here as objective as the observation of chicken-pox... the observer...is highly relative".
Alister McGrath in Dawkins's God:Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Lifeis also severely critical of Dawkins analysis. In addition to suggesting that the notion of a God Meme is simplisitic, MdGrath cites a metareview of 100 studies of the effects of religious belief on health and wellbeing which shows that it has a positive effect in 79% of recent studies in the field
External links
- The essay
- Different Types of Memes: Recipemes, Selectemes and Explanemes in the Journal of Mimetics by John Z. Langrish
references
- This was cited in John Bowker's Is God a Virus as British Humanist Association (1992)
- published as Is God a Virus? (SPCK, 1995, 274pp) He is severely critical of the claims, and of the quality of Dawkins argument, suggesting eg that "Logic never interferes with Dawkins's arguments where God is concerned" (p73). The other quotes come from p73 as well.
- An article in the Journal of Memetics in 1999 citing Bowker's book, comments that "There are two further problems with the memes as viruses school of thought. One is that it ignores Dawkins original use for memes - as the basis for a new kind of evolution, acting on top of genetic evolution. Epidemiology is not in itself evolutionary unless it asks historical questions about the viruses. The second problem is that it has not found a use for memes as such. Ideas about the spread of `foreign' ideas have been around a long time. Have they been improved by the addition of memes?" Different Types of Memes: Recipemes, Selectemes and Explanemes
- McGrath op cit. p 119-138
- op cit p 136 citing Koenig and Cohen The Link between Religion and Health OUP 2002
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