Mar 6, 2014 at 11:17 AM | John Shade

Thanks John. The memetic perspective can indeed explain enormous success. While boiling it down this far is necessarily simplistic, memes that hit our psychological hot-buttons in order to get themselves spread, are much more likely to succeed in spreading than rather boring facts (as long as there is enough uncertainty in the topic domain to get the process started – and lets face it there’s plenty of uncertainty in the climate domain). In other words, narrative success is rewarded more than verifiability. In turn we are highly sensitised to the effect of button-pushing memes because we’ve evolved with them essentially forever, and they confer huge *net* benefit (notwithstanding some very major downsides on occasion, and possibly the whole of CAGW is one such downside). Once they’ve become dominant, and because they penetrate the psyche to literally change our perceptions and even morals, meme actions can result in a *perceived* increase in uncertainty (via noble cause corruption, confirmation bias, motivated reasoning) and suppression of useful work to bound uncertainty, hence assisting their own survival. The akward upside is that civilisation may not have arisen without memeplexes, so that seems pretty critical and we probably shouldn’t therefore just attempt to eliminate them (even if this were possible) 0:

Memeplexes or other cutural entities with high memetic content (extreme politics) often form cross coalitions. I guess another heavy downside one is Eugenics-antisemitism-National Socialism in the 1930s/40s. But the Christian hook-up is I think much more of a “shall-we-shan’t-we-dance” arrangement than a “let’s dance”! The overall Christian response has been muted over decades rather than enthusiastic, and while there are a small minority of enthusiastic supporters, I think these are not far from balanced by a number of religious skeptics (and I get the impression that the level of skepticism is higher than in the general population that includes the non-religious or weakly religious). In my essay I also quote Hayhoe in support, and the evangelist Cornwall alliance in quite passionate opposition. As time passes, these 2 memeplexes (CAGW and Christianity) will have to find their relationship, which is still tentative at best. CAGW is starting to muscle into territory that Christians used to control, i.e. morals, which ups the ante. The Christian memeplex has the choice of actively resisting, or joining up to become an ‘official’ alliance and sharing both cakes. I’ve noticed that a few more bible / christian forum sites express (usually mild) skepticism in recent times. Ironically for science, this appears to be based mostly upon the principle of humbleness, and the fact that we must admit that we “don’t know”, a kind of revenge against scientists from when the boot was on the other foot regarding religious ‘certainty’ about the sun or the age of the Earth or whatever. Don’t really know what’s happening with other world religions.