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Comment by akamaka | Hacker News Reader

I'm embarrassed every time an article like this gets posted to Hacker News.

I don't think anyone here would take Ray Kurzweil's books seriously, but quite a few people would upvote an article by Dawkins or Chomsky, whose books have contributed to their respective fields in the same way that Kurzweil has to ours -- which is to say, not at all.

P.S. The last time someone submitted an article about the Sokal affair, I posted a short comment about the importance of postmodernism here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=564856

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Books are not supposed to contribute at all. They are supposed to be an overarching view of the knowledge and ideas that exist in the area of interest. His books were meant to educate the public about evolution through natural selection.

For contributions to the field please refer to his journal publications. A partial list is given in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_publications_by_Richard...

Yes, I specifically said books, because the three writers I mentioned are all smart guys who did important work early on in their careers, but then went on to write a lot of junk on other subjects.

The problem is that it's not Dawkins' or Chomsky's academic articles that have showed up on HN, it's the other stuff.

Dawkins... , whose books have contributed to [his field]... not at all.

Ever heard of a "meme"?

Dawkins has contributed plenty to his field, and he writes very accessible books.

That essay by him obviously doesn't criticize the entire field. He's just telling his readers to put up some nonsense filters before they start reading padded fluff.

Memetics was influenced by him, since he coined the term, but it's hardly a "field" in the same sense as Computer Science!

In writing his book, Dawkins ignored the last 2000+ years of scholarship on the nature of ideas, and influenced a tiny group of academics who are completely isolated from any other form of philosophy.

The Journal of Memetics (which was the only one of its kind) ceased publishing in 2005.

Dawkins never wrote a book on memes. He wrote a book on evolution at the genetic level, The Selfish Gene. In it, he drew a comparison to genes that replicate themselves using organisms as a vehicle to ideas that replicate themselves using humans as a vehicle.

It was a throw-away comparison, not the point of the book. But, the term "meme" is a good meme, and it caught on.

The point isn't that he started a "field". The point is that Dawkins's ideas about selfish/cooperative genes (and the extensions of those ideas to the very idea of ideas themselves) have given rise to new directions in biology (and philosophy, in the case of memes).

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