In the summer of 1850, the Englishman Alfred Tennyson galloped past the opposition and was appointed Poet Laureate. He was not an obvious choice, but his triumph was made nigh inevitable by the smashing success of his new poem: In Memoriam. Written as a tribute to a college friend, Arthur Hallam, who had died some…
Review ofBlackmore, Susan. The meme machine. Oxford, 1999. 264 p bibl index ISBN 0-19-850365-2 $25.00 Ever since theologians conceived of God as the ultimate cause of everything, formulating perhaps the first TOE (Theory of Everything), the reductionist urge has continued to tempt the human mind to explain the staggering complexity we see around, not just…
The fundamental claim is that selfish people out reproduce unselfish ones, but superimposed on that is the claim that (really) selfish people who are self-deceived into thinking they are unselfish out reproduce selfish people who know their own selfishness.
Each organism is in pursuit of—that is, values—its own proper life, which is all that the (nonhuman) individual organism either can or ought to pursue. It turns out, however, that values can be held intrinsically only as they are inclusively distributed.