This link http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/selfish06/selfish06_index.html  leads to audio and transcripts of a panel, including Dawkins and Dennett, assessing the 'Selfish Gene' book. One of the speakers, Krebs, says: Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I'll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes are built according to scientific principals and they work. They stay aloft and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications such as the dummy planes of the Cargo cults in jungle clearings or the bees-waxed wings of Icaraus don't.

Interesting that the physicist, Hillis, makes the following reference to Marx:

Physicist and computer scientist W. Daniel Hillis has noted:

"Notions like Selfish Genes, memes, and extended phenotypes are powerful and exciting. They make me think differently. Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time arguing against people who have overinterpreted these ideas. They're too easily misunderstood as explaining more than they do. So you see, this Dawkins is a dangerous guy. Like Marx. Or Darwin."

I am yet to listen to the audio or read the full transcriptions, which have been corrected by the speakers, but it all looks worthwhile.

Barry

The toughest ticket in London's West End last week wasn't for a new mega-hit musical from Cameron Mackintosh, or a new play by Tom Stoppard. The people who flocked to The Old Theatre were greeted by famed British radio and television presenter Melvyn Bragg ("Start the Week") with the following opening words:

"They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines."

The world has changed and the biggest change is the accelerated rate of change. On the front page, the news pages, and the OpEd page of The New York Times on any given day you will read about stem cell research, therapeutic cloning, synthesizing genes, Web 2.0, Internet 2, quantum computation, branes, extra dimensions, the Landscape, etc. This is evidence that third culture is the culture, that science is the culture.

In the mid-1970s, as a graduate student at Harvard, Robert Trivers wrote five papers that opened the door to the scientific study of human nature. (Trivers also wrote the introduction to the original 1976 edition of The Selfish Gene, restored in the 30th anniversary edition). Since that time, Dawkins, by building on the work of John Maynard Smith, William Hamilton, George C. Williams, and Trivers, and by adding and incorporating his own original, ingenious, and mind-bending ideas, has revolutionized the way we think about science and redefined the role of the public intellectual in western culture. It's not just about science: it's who we are, how we are, and even, how we think.

It's not surprising that some people want it all to go away. Around the fifteenth century, the word "humanism" was tied in with the idea of one intellectual whole. A Florentine nobleman knew that to read Dante but ignore science was ridiculous. Leonardo was a great artist, a great scientist, a great technologist. Michelangelo was an even greater artist and engineer. These men were intellectually holistic giants. To them, the idea of embracing humanism while remaining ignorant of the latest scientific and technological achievements would have been incomprehensible.

In the twentieth century, a period of great scientific advancement, instead of having science and technology at the center of the intellectual world — of having a unity in which scholarship included science and technology along with literature and art — the official culture kicked them out. Traditional humanities scholars looked at science and technology as some sort of technical special product. Elite universities nudged science out of the liberal arts undergraduate curriculum — and out of the minds of many young people, who, as the new academic establishment, so marginalized themselves that they are no longer within shouting distance of the action.

Yet it's the products of this educational system that go straight from their desks at university literary magazines to their offices in the heart of the cultural establishment at our leading newspapers, magazines, and publishers. It's a problem that's systemic and not individual. Unless one is pursuing a career path in science, it is extremely difficult for a non-science major at a top research university to graduate with anything approaching what can be considered an education in science. I recently talked with a noted Italian intellectual, who is as familiar with string theory and as he is with Dante, and writes about both in his philosophical novels. In appraising this situation, he argued for restraint and compassion. "They just don't know," he sighed, "they just don't know." He might well have added, they don't even know that they don't know.

Somebody needs to tell them. Otherwise, we wind up with the center of culture based on a closed system, a process of text in/text out, and no empirical contact with the real world. One can only marvel at, for example, art critics who know nothing about visual perception; "social constructionist" literary critics uninterested in the human universals documented by anthropologists; opponents of genetically modified foods, additives, and pesticide residues who are ignorant of genetics and evolutionary biology.

As examples, one need only read with astonishment, but not surprise, recent essays in The New York Times Book Review coining pejoratives such as "evolutionism" and "scientism" to critique the set of ideas that inform this edition of Edge. These essays appear not to be driven by any apparent scientific knowledge or expertise, but by a need in the writer to confirm deeply felt superstition-based ideas and/or pre-conceived political models. The message: science is not welcome. But apparently what is welcome is that which writers ignorant of science don't know about their subjects.

I happen to disagree with the statement that " third culture is the culture, that science is the culture"- I think that philosophy will always stand above (and beneath) science. But I want to put that aside for now (although it relates to an important debate that we have to have at some stage).

The main point I want to make here is that there is a movement to "reclaim  the enlightenment" and we should be part of it.  Very few of the people who are so enthused by the militant materialism of people like Dawkins and Dennett have any knowledge of Marxism - what they do know is a caricature at best. We need to introduce them to Marxism (which will require us to deepen our own understanding in the process). The situation has been made worse by the fact that people like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin (who  deeply oppose the ideas of Dawkins and Dennett, from IMV a reactionary perspective) have labelled themselves as Marxists.  Chomsky too has consistently opposed the ideas of Daniel Dennett (and others with similar views) in academic discussion about the nature of language and mind.

A slight digression: Chomsky is not only a pseudo-leftist in his non-academic persona - he's also deeply conservative when it comes to developments in lingusitics, philosophy and cognitive science - clinging to his old linguistic theory (which made him famous about 40 years ago) and refusing to consider the serious challenges coming from younger thinkers in the area. He has a reputation for being arrogant and intransigent in this regard.

Anyway, I'll keep reading the material provided on the Edge discussion of "The Selfish Gene" and write some further comments in this thread when I get a chance.