Bret Weinstein disagrees with Richard Dawkins over memes (Peter Boghossian & Bret Weinstein)

Im not certain if questions are answered here, and im likewise uncertain how outlandish it is of me to think that i may afford a couple seconds rent in Bret Weinstein's and company's mind; but, im gonna try anyway….So is culture then all that learning that is not self initiated (unprompted) and birthed by the individual? Or is culture simply all that information that regards and addresses itself to the mending of behavior of the individual within society – more so than anything having to do with reality itself? Is "thou shallt not kill " culture; and "goats milk is more nutritional than cows", non cultural?

You are way over thinking of Brett. Do not dog packs have cultures? What about hyenas and lions? Or chimpanzees. Do they not have a culture? Dawkins is wrong because human culture, like intelligence, is an evolved form of chimpanzee culture.

Going to suggest discussion over such topic to the resourced based economy community. Needs much indepth.
..Would culture then be hand crafted over time and integrated into various nations of tribes until suddenly one day a tribe would want to integrated shoes,white blouses and black singlets like other tribes did?… Then this being part of a new culture tribe people? Even pick up another book ? Our culture tribe integrated, it's part of the Maori culture. you come here and become the tribe people .

The inconvenient truth from all this is that current western liberal culture is going to be an evolutionary dead end for it’s members. It will cause an extinction event for a mal-adapted culture.

These are "Deep Waters"! Great topic to further ponder. Cheers

This concept is more foundational to everything in the human world than humans will ever realize.

Herds of animals who work in cooperative groups with hierarchies internal and inherent predates human civilization.
Is culture not codified biological necessity, perceived or otherwise?

So, i'm an idiot, but I think Bret is saying culture is biology because ones genes jumped from steering us on an individual level to a group level, ie culture. The religion example specifically illustrates that religion, an inclination that seems deeply buried in the human evolutionary psyche, is better for the group (culrure) than the individual, so culture has evolved to be a biological process of groups of humans. Hmmmm

bret provides a constant stream of hilarious nonsense. he literally starts off by saying "culture is just as biological as genes" even his guest is like right……..totally…..

Course and effect, basic scientific hypothesis. Everything has a beginning and an end, some of those none religious and scientific power hungry individuals choose to end those lives sooner because they can.
"GOD COMPLEX" let's just have an honest conversation, Gene therapy isn't about saving Lives, it's about controlling life because those so called powerful and rich believe they are GOD. Off topic to a degree, but very appt given the current debate.

Dawkins' musings on culture in The selfish Gene were, relative to his main argument, something of an afterthought.

I still don't know what Dawkins was wrong about. Either I missed it or it was never mentioned in the video.

Bret seems to be arguing that culture is . . . an extended phenotype

Given Dawkins’ propensity for insane ideas it’s actually difficult to agree with him. For example in River Out of Eden he declares horizontal gene transfer never happens. I have read most of his popular books and yes, he’s a witty and entertaining writer. But he’s a lousy logician. For my money the biologist par excellence was Aristotle even though he made a few mistakes.

If evolution were true we would not see the complexity in living creatures that we do. Complexity is counter productive for mere survival.

The younger generations with thier craving for attention on social media will create a booming business of attention addiction rehab facilities.

My cat's breath smells like cat food.

How many people had to look up epistemology? Congratulations for not being an incourious lazy researcher… epistemology sounds like the academic definition of spirituality.. in a word intuition.. intuition which depends upon acknowledging the understanding of objective history, particularly regarding Rome

SMH yes.. The Ten Commandments have been taken off the table for.. the Jesuit Blood Oath which was entered into the USA Library of Congress in 1913.. hasn't actually been a picnic since then? Look what happened to Canada since Arturo Sosa went there and declared it a Jesuit Province 4 years ago?

C'mon – It HAS been corrected – there is a whole field of comparative research along these lines. I know I study culture and cultural evolution in the songs of birds.

those that can follow rules despite the individual (sometimes short term) negative payoffs of rule following get rewarded as a group – and that foresight (rule following behaviour) benefits those populations. Good example: if you can establish a society in which everyone agrees that women are not to be raped, that is detrimental to aggressive males' genes not being spread as widely… so why would that tribe agree (for their ingroup and territory at least)? They freeup tremendous ressources they used to have to spend on protecting women from the next door neighbour. Instead the women can even contribute by for example getting water from the well while the men are doing other things (hunting for instance) agregating more ressources and nurturing more offspring. While protection is only needed when a neighbouring tribe encroaches on the territory.

I think the right analogy here is between the culture that inhabits an individual mind and the flora that inhabit an organism's microbiome. Cultural elements (memes) are imperfect self replicators that depend on a host for survival and transmission, much like the gut bacteria of many complex animals. Both can also be said to constitute a part of their host's extended phenotype. Bret had difficulty getting Dawkins to consider this last idea during their debate, but the analogy makes it easy. Many human populations are adapted to life in northern latitudes that receive relatively little sunlight (i.e. they have pale skin). These populations could not exist in these climates without the memes for fabricating clothing and making fire. Those crafts are part of their extended phenotype. Similarly, ruminant animals are adapted to eat a diet of mostly fibrous grasses, which they could not digest without the aid of cellulolytic bacteria that break down the fiber into digestible nutrients. A ruminant animal is not valid as an organism without its gut bacteria, just as humans in a majority of their current environments are not valid organisms without their cultures.