Richard Dawkins and Memetics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins

Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in his book, The Selfish Gene.
He wrote the foreward for The Meme Machine. He is an ethologist and
outspoken atheist.

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMES.html

This article describes memetics as "the theoretical and empirical
science that studies the replication, spread and evolution of memes".
The article lists Dawkins' three characteristics for a successful
replicator which are the following:

copying-fidelity: the more faithful the copy, the more will remain of
the initial pattern after several rounds of copying. If a painting is
reproduced by making photocopies from photocopies, the underlying
pattern will quickly become unrecognizable.

fecundity: the faster the rate of copying, the more the replicator
will spread. An industrial printing press can churn out many more
copies of a text than an office copying machine.

longevity: the longer any instance of the replicating pattern
survives, the more copies can be made of it. A drawing made by etching
lines in the sand is likely to be erased before anybody could have
photographed or otherwise reproduced it.

Freud vs. Westermarck

Joseph Kemmerly Fri 11:00 AM

Consilience mentions both Sigmund Freud and Edvard Westermarch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freud

Freud is definitely the more famous of the two. He tried to explain how the unconcious mind works dividing the unconcious into the id, ego, and sugerego. The article briefly mentions his views regarding religion. Freud takes a pessimistic view of religion describing it as an illusion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edvard_Westermarck

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermark_effect

Edvard Westermark was an antropologist, philosopher, and sociologist from Finland. He is famous for observing a phenomenon that is now known as the Westermark Effect, that is when two people grow up with each other they both tend to be naturally unattracted to each other sexually.

Freud believed the opposite of Westermark. Freud believed that members of the same family feel sexual attraction to one another naturally so incest taboos have to be created as a way to counteract this phenomenon. Modernly, most believe that Westermark has won the debate because the scientific evidence is on his side.

Weekly Post

Right now I am on Chapter 9, which deals with social sciences. Here's
an article that discusses the social sciences:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science

This article mentions when the social sciences consist of:
Anthropology, Communication, Economics, Education, History, Geography,
Linguistics, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology. The
article also mentions how some social sciences overlap with the
natural sciences, such as Sociobiology. There is also a very brief
mention of there being an attempt to find consilience between the
various sciences.

I also found an article that discusses a topic where religion and
science overlap:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/origin_belief

Origion beliefs are explanations about how the universe and human life
came to be. There are science based explanations, such as the Big
Bang and biological evolution. There are religion based explanations
as well.

First Week's Links

I posted links on the Religious Diversity Yahoo group to two Wikipedia articles. One is on Religious Pluralism and the other is on Comparative Mythology.