Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

always get a kick out of the fact that Crick was into panspermia!

you also need things like human relationships, art, love and so on

Science not necessarily very good at explaining these either.

There was a set of trials that demonstrated mondrians were about as effective as acupuncture

I mean fake mondrians were as well received as real ones, not that they applied mondrians to treat backaches

You mean my certification in colored rectangle therapy is useless?!

you also need things like human relationships, art, love and so on

Science not necessarily very good at explaining these either.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, June 18, 2013 11:56 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't know about that.

This 'scientific view of the universe is bleak and depressing' vs 'scientific view of the universe is full of wonder!' debate, as played out not so much here but in many conversations and just in the discourse generally.

It seems to me to be groping at but missing a more important question - is 'the scientific view of the universe' something you can actually live with.

If it is, it doesn't matter if it's depressing; if it isn't, it doesn't matter if it's full of wonder.

I don't know what the answer is, but I feel it might be different for different people, and for the same person in different situations.

I also think a much better advertisement for science would be 'We can use these methods to find ways to make planes fly or to make new medicines', rather than 'Wow, isn't everything wonderful and amazing'.

The first one is not really debatable, the second probably just goes round and round in circles, no?

Cardamon otm

from 4.45 o_O

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFn-ixX9edg

lol x10

WAT

theeeee dayyyyy killlllroooooooy loooooooost hiiiis miiiiiiiiiind

his best work since The Blind Watchmaker imo

i still prefer daft punk to richard dawkins

I guess the shirt was a fair warning

Needs to be mashed up with Mister Rogers' "Garden of Your Mind"

i think it needs the outro to new slaves tacked onto the end

The electronic clarinet solo was a fitting outro

what the.

Quite enjoying Dawkins' slow descent into madness tbh, interested to see at what point his followers will catch on and slowly back away.

this made me think of herbie hancock "rockit"

"Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics."

this is not my kind of problems but i wonder if this guy knows about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science

your move, pope francis

Fucking hell.

I wonder if Dawkins had a Geocities page.

http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr06/2013/6/24/9/enhanced-buzz-8023-1372081141-2.jpg

holy shit, it's coleman dawkins

this made me think of herbie hancock "rockit"

I was thinking it's like freestyle played backwards

LOOOOOOL

Hahahaha that's like something that comes on at 3am on the local cable access channel.

Dawkins actually co-produced "Xavier Renegade Angel"

if the haters aren't converted by that clip, I don't know what it's gonna take

i like him more after seeing that. i only watched the music part, but it seems that what he was saying -- about how linguistic/symbolic information is spread in a similar, but much, much more rapid way than genetic information -- is similar to things that terrence mckenna said.

i guess that's been his schtick for a while, but i never thought of it as being interesting in hippe/psychadelic terms until seeing that clip.

I like watching something in the present and thinking "that's going to look very 'of its era' in the future."

#seapunk

I like watching something in the present and thinking "that's going to look very 'of its era' in the future."

― even the beatles had a coinstar machine in their living room (Crabbits), Monday, June 24, 2013 4:18 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It kinda looked like 1996, too.

1996 is very 2013

http://www.amazon.com/review/RK8LQ93NP1YCI

http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloud.jpg

ah i should have looked for a dawkins thread sorry. should have known you guys would have been on the tip of the crazy pulse. i am a fan of this guy now.

I'd like that amazon review to be real, because it would support an unfounded notion I've got about the new atheists as science people who have to spend a lot of time being rational in their day jobs and thus become irrationally angry outside of their specialisation

cf. stark difference between, 'Fascinating, there's a 5% increase in the level of oxygen in this puddle' vs 'ALL RELIGION MUST BE DESTROYED'

the few harcore atheists i've known have tended to be non-scientist angry libertarian types

lmao @ video

not sure where else to put this http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114127/science-not-enemy-humanities

sounds like he's solved war, not sure why he keeps on nagging the humanities

This article in Nautilus contradicts his first sentence:
http://nautil.us/issue/4/the-unlikely/monsters-marvels-and-the-birth-of-science

Should I bother reading more?

his whole lede is infuriating. trying to claim spinoza as an evolutionary psychologist! the gall!

This passage, from a 2011 review in The Nation of three books by Sam Harris by the historian Jackson Lears, makes the standard case for the prosecution by the left:

Positivist assumptions provided the epistemological foundations for Social Darwinism and pop-evolutionary notions of progress, as well as for scientific racism and imperialism. These tendencies coalesced in eugenics, the doctrine that human well-being could be improved and eventually perfected through the selective breeding of the "fit" and the sterilization or elimination of the "unfit." ... Every schoolkid knows about what happened next: the catastrophic twentieth century. Two world wars, the systematic slaughter of innocents on an unprecedented scale, the proliferration of unimaginable destructive weapons, brushfire wars on the periphery of empire—all these events involved, in various degrees, the application of sceintific research to advanced technology.

Isn't this just a denunciation of the misguided uses of quasi-scientific "knowledge" rather than an attack on scientific reason itself? It's almost like Pinker is engaged in straw-manning.