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RANDOM ITEMS
You may have seen the recent Newsweek cover article "Science Finds God".
Jeff Lowder addresses the claim in "Has Science Found God?" on the
Secular Web. He includes many related links:
http://www.infidels.org/secular_web/feature/1998/newsweek.html
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"Thumbs Up" for Dawkins from Roger Ebert (US Film Critic)
I received this interesting observation from a visitor. (Thanks David!)
> On the Dark City DVD, film critic Roger Ebert does a commentary track,
> (which to non-DVD people means that you can optionally watch the movie
> while someone talks about it). While discussing the underground race,
> the Strangers, he starts talking about Richard Dawkins! This was a nice
> surprise. The mention is at about 1:11 past chapter 8 on the DVD. Keep
> in mind that Ebert is talking during the movie so it doesn't translate
> well into text:
>
> "The Darwinian Richard Dawkins has suggested that while genes certainly
> control our physical development and continuity from generation to
> generation, there might also be Darwinian functions at work in the area
> of ideas and he calls these 'memes'. A meme, like a gene, is something
> that jumps from host to host, it's primary purpose is to perpetrate
> itself - but it's a little nugget of idea. It's a, a snatch of song, or
> a prejudice, or a preference, or a piece of information, or an urban
> legend, or a saying, or a belief, and successful memes are passed on
> from generation to generation just as nursery rhymes are passed on from
> child to child while unsuccessful ones are forgotten and passed out of
> use. And it's almost as if the scientist here is putting together memes
> for the next days use on the part of the people who are going to be
> experimented on. He's telling some of them, 'well you remember a beach,
> and you remember a happy childhood, you remember that you're rich now
> whereas yesterday you thought you were poor, you remember that you're
> married, you remember what your job is, you have these values now and
> you have these ideas and these songs and these memories and these
> political beliefs in your mind and I'm going to mix them all together a
> drop at a time.' This guy with needles and test tubes is doing
> physically what Dawkins is talking about our minds doing mentally and
> that is assembling a personality out of all the snatches of input and
> memory that are available."
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