Viruses of the Mind Viruses of the Mind "Viruses of the Mind" is an essay by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, first published in the book "Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind" (1993). Dawkins originally wrote the essay in 1991 and delivered it as a Voltaire Lecture on 6 November 1992 at the Conway Hall Humanist Centre. The essay discusses how religion can be viewed as a meme, an idea previously expressed by Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" (1976). Dawkins analyzes the propagation of religious ideas and behaviors as a memetic virus, analogous to how biological and computer viruses spread. The essay was later
The Evolution of Beauty that was adapted from "The Evolution of Beauty", stating that it is "both erroneous and confusing, for it misrepresents sexual selection, natural selection, and modern evolutionary theory." He later described the book as a "mixed bag" but stated that the bad parts outweighed the good, and stated that Prum's arguments were "tendentious". Evolutionary biologists Gerald Borgia and Gregory Ball state that Prum misrepresents opposition of scientists to the model of runaway selection and that he fails to make a case for its ubiquity. Further, they claim Prum inappropriately injects politics into biology, conflating eugenics and genocide with female mate choice