![]() ![]() More intelligent people choose better on such tests - but this is a circular argument, as intelligence tests are designed to measure this sort of performance. If you are shown two jars of sweets, one with nine white and one red, and one with 92 white and eight red, from which jar are you more likely to randomly get a red sweet? Many people choose the larger numbers, even though they would succeed only 8 per cent of the time rather than 10 per cent of the time. We are told that humans violate key principles of rationality. It often reads like an academic paper: if you don't know what a 2x2 covariation detection task is, or if phrases such as "dominance hierarchy of your conspecifics" are mysteries, you will be forced to read some of the thousand-odd references. Yet his writing is inaccessible to non-scientists, the proletariat. Stanovich worries that there will be an "intellectual proletariat" who do not understand post-Darwinian science. This book functions in a huge theatre, but its wide scope and frequent topic changes are distracting. And what about the dysrationalia that leads to terrorism? When we visit doctors, we want them to recommend the best treatment despite the difficulties of reliable reasoning with statistical evidence and emotional distractions. It might once have made sense to thump somebody who made you cross, but now it is illegal. Stanovich suggests that evolution has got us so far, but now society demands more rationality. We are robots let us rebel against our raw genetic and memetic heritage! Knowing that we have dysrationalia, we should do better. He introduces "dysrationalia", rather like dyslexia, to talk about our cognitive limitations. Genes, he says, have given our brains their physical structure, and this lets us down: we are not as rational as we might like to think. Keith Stanovich's The Robot's Rebellion gives us a breathless tour of genes, memes and cognitive science, and ends up taking in terrorism, market politics and Christmas delusions. If, as seems the case, we are merely vehicles for selfish genes and memes, why not use science (itself a meme) to help us validate and filter out better memes? In fact, memes are worse than genes: they do not even require us to live to the age of sexual reproduction, so a meme for martyrdom can work whereas a gene for sterility would fizzle out. Who is to say what "successful" is? Notoriously, genes are selfish, and so are memes. It is not so much that we choose our memes, but that we live in a meme pool of successful ideas that are passed on from carrier to carrier. I tell you some ideas, and the memes replicate directly into your brain. Indeed, the cultural ideas we have are memes, and memes reproduce rather like genes, but faster. Then, somewhere in the millennia of evolution, we humans invented culture - or, rather, culture found us. We are the vehicles that carry them to each successive generation.
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