Susan Blackmore has written a couple of posts for “The Stone” recently that are interesting philosophical riffs on evolutionary biology. The latest is a response to the harsh criticism she received after the first.

While I find the discussion of genes, memes, and — Blackmore’s addition — temes (which she says are technological memes) well worth thinking about, I’m not at all drawn to the sort of hardcore determinism that she ultimately embraces. It’s all well and good to think about human beings and human culture in terms of replication, but that doesn’t seem to necessitate the negation of consciousness and creativity (which is where Blackmore concludes).

As the quote above suggests, Blackmore entirely rejects the notion of creativity; as the (relatively) short piece proceeds, she also dismisses free will and consciousness (at least as something special that would enable us — as Dawkins suggsted, in The Selfish Gene — to “rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.”

She doesn’t actually go into any detail about her disagreement with Dawkins on what I take to be a particularly critical point about human consciousness, offering only a citation to a book she published in 1999 and the following dramatic sentence:

We are meme machines soon to become embedded in a three replicator system and without any consciousness, free will, or other spooky power that might enable to leap outside the system.

In order to sell such a conclusion — one that seems more than a little bit disturbing to me, incidentally — I’d need to read an argument against consciousness, creativity, and free will that’s a good deal more serious and detailed; all we have here is a flat assertion.