Politicizing Biology: Daniel Dennett's <i>Breaking the Spell</i>: Part II
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In a previous paper we critiqued Daniel Dennett's evolutionary science of religion as expounded in his book Breaking the Spell. In the present paper we wish to follow up on this line of inquiry and discuss in more detail and depth the political and social implications of Dennett's work. The authors find that while Dennett's science of religion and the memetic theory of culture on which it rests are scarcely persuasive as science, they are an effective species of “bio-rhetoric” whose purpose is to defend the status of the sciences and the public supremacy of the “physical stance” on which Dennett thinks they rest. In the conclusion of the paper the authors suggest that Dennett's use of the rhetoric of naturalism and in particular the “science” of memetics has disturbing implications when understood in the context of the post-9/11 world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".