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Dennett's counterproductive counter-attack against the critics of memetics

While responding to the charge that memetics is useless because ideas are Lamarkian while genetics are Darwinian, DD makes a particularly pompous and defensive --- and shallow -- response (he makes it 25 minutes into part 2 of the audio version).  To show how off target the critics are, he points out that with ideas there is no distinction between the germ line and the somatic line; nor is there a distinction between genotype and phenotype.  That's supposed to show that memetics is quite unlamarkian.  But this reply seems embarrassingly counter-productive.  For Larmarkians, who were taken seriously prior to Mendel's discoveries, were in no need of such distinctions.  Theirs was a holistic account.  And in that way, it actually seems all the more appropo to look at memetics under a Lamarkian lens.  And it is all the more inappropriate to compare the transmission of ideas to neo-Darwinian genetics.

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