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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".