Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

I dunno what intelligent means but he is intellectually incurious, which I take as a sign of a serious character flaw.

he has a second class degree in zoology

maybe some english person in the 1970s had to say something about memes and for some reason it transpired that it would be richard dawkins who would say those things

what important science stuff did yall think the guy noted for inventing the word for funny cat pictures was doing all day

evolutionary biology i thought?

as far as i can tell he has been a "public intellectual" w a grasp of biology for ages

yeah, Dawkins' coining of the term meme was practically an afterthought (and not a very coherent one at that, as his own subsequent positions have borne out), it was not his central focus.

xp

'Dawkins vs. Gould' by Kim Sterelny made it seem like he made very important contributions. idk

the problem with the 'genius' / 'moron' thing is that he doesn't seem like a moron, he seems like a person of moderate intelligence able to form simple yet mostly coherent statements about things if not in any developed or nuanced way and with a pathological negative incapability

his contributions do seem to have been important in some demonstrable way but it isnt clear that necessarily it would have required an extraordinary intelligence to arrive at those conclusions

maybe his 'insights' were latent in his field at that time but were considered counter-intuitive or otherwise 'controversial' and it just required someone with undue self-regard and total indifference to doubt to rest his reputation upon publishing them

i dont think he is a clear thinker. i'm sure he worked hard in the lab, once. but the fact that the thing he is most famous for is a repurposed accident is exactly why his reputation as a generically brilliant scientist explaining ourselves to ourselves seems so inflated to me.

why you got to diss red dwarf fans? okay i guess the last few seasons have been dire.

did you not see the conjunction AND? for that clause to have applied to you, as your wounded response reads, you would also have to be a progressive metal blogger, which i somehow doubt

come back when you have learned to think

or if you have some good album recommendations!

✓

The rational/emotional dichotomy Dawkins sets up isn't even scientific: it's a fairly standard trope in modern neuroscience that "rational" thinking involves in large part the creation of post-facto justifications for judgements that are arrived at with significant input from emotions, biases and other unconscious or subconscious influences. Neurologically, the limbic system, amygdala and other areas involved in "emotion" are required for normal human decision making -- patients with major damage to those areas do not become hyperrational Spocks, or even Dawkins-style tinpot philosophers. There is evidence from a broad array of other fields that cognition is embodied, experienced, personal.

Only a truly great fool (and Dawkins, IMO, is right up there, fool-wise) would believe he knows enough about how other people think and experience their ideas to say something like "go away and learn how think" to someone who disagrees with him, especially when the topic of dispute involves an intensely personal experience (rape) that for all he knows is shared by many of the same people he is trying to belittle convince.

kingfish, I'll look up that "Science Delusion" book, sounds like my kind of thing.

― Plasmon, Friday, 1 August 2014 07:39 (2 weeks ago)

nb i like this post a lot

patients with major damage to those areas do not become hyperrational Spocks, or even Dawkins-style tinpot philosophers

to quote treesh, '✓'

Dawkins always (or least certainly lately) struck me as one of those guys who actually is pretty smart, but so smugly smart his arrogance or whatever pushes him well past reason and logic and into parts that undermine whatever his intelligence brings to bear. Like the armchair death penalty guy in the Errol Morris doc who is so full of himself he doesn't even realize he is being used by neo-Nazis to prove pseudo-science, because he is the expert, and ergo can't be wrong.

undue self-regard and total indifference to doubt

imo this is about 80% of the secret to success in academia. dawkins may also have a bit of a brick-from-anchorman thing going on, where being conversant in the vocabulary, style and patterns of a tiny field allows you to bounce around inside it being respectable and occasionally successful, but the moment you try to transfer that skill into other fields you're quickly exposed for the buffoon you are.

though unfortunately the vocabulary, style and patterns of public school and oxford-educated people pass as respectable almost everywhere

I don't think he seems unintelligent, just intolerant. He doesn't pay attention to other people and their accounts of their experiences because he doesn't care about them. I don't think his argument for a "singular" scientific truth against this postmodern notion of multiple narratives is, for him, a philosophical position as much as it is just a value judgment about what he thinks is important.

the british empiricist tradition that he purports to subscribe to has traditionally given short shrift to the sort of appeal to vatic authority that his prominence rests upon, nevermind that his authority in the field of zoology, evolutionary psychology etc should not readily be transferred to the field of just about everything in the realm of worldly affairs

i don't think we should discount the fact that dawkins is getting old and ornery (even more ornery than before, that is) and his judgement and intelligence seems much diminished from his prime.

i wouldn't be surprised if he's actually experiencing the earliest symptoms of dementia. i'm serious about that.

lol i was going to post something like that in jest. the other day i was surprised to see that he is over seventy years old, past his scripturally allotted three score and ten and well into the alzheimers envelope.

there are so many people twenty years older than him who are infinitely more lucid though. he doesn't appear to be cognitively diminished to any great extent. if anything age is just refining him, realizing his true potential within the sphere of discourse.

As a writer Dawkins has been able to elucidate some pretty complex ideas for a popular audience. That's nothing to sniff at.

He's just arrogant and myopic. He's also far from the only prominent scientist to be a dope about non-science matters.

Just seems like when you become the sort of public intellectual people turn to for answers, you also become the sort of person too willing to provide them.

Yep.

It just dawned on me how much mean-spirited fun the Richard Dawkins RIP thread is going to be.

Not that I would wish that day to come for a very long time etc etc

first time I ever laughed at dawkins was seeing him in some debate with religious figures in, I think, coventry cathedral when he explained that he didn't worry about the lack of afterlife. when pushed on if he'd like to live longer he nodded, clearly having given the matter some thought previously, and explained very solemnly that he would like to live for "about a thousand years"

a good round number

I don't think he seems unintelligent, just intolerant. He doesn't pay attention to other people and their accounts of their experiences because he doesn't care about them.

Well, I dunno, from what I can see he thinks their accounts of their experiences should be dismissed because they are bad people, with a bad agenda, whose accounts of their experiences are designed to be mystifying.

I think one reason why he seems weird to us (I mean, most of us on this thread think he's weird as far as I can see) is because a lot of us have probably ingested, borne in mind whether or not we've stuck with, a certain amount of Marxism and other ideas from the political left wing, and he hasn't.

To me, it seems sort of ... obvious that trying to critique religious violence without looking at the economic situation of the perps is flawed, because it's all superstructure and no base. And it seems obvious that things have happened in thought since the 18th century and you can't just pretend otherwise. But these might not be at all obvious if you haven't been to seminars with Marxist professors at an ex-polytechnic university, and if you've spent your life studying science I bet you could avoid that altogether

(The stuff I've said and a lot of others have said along the lines of 'reason versus emotion is stupidly simple opposition' - that's sort of dialectic, isn't it?)

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/richard-dawkins-on-babies-with-down-syndrome-abort-it-and-try-again-it-would-be-immoral-to-bring-it-into-the-world-9681549.html

keepin it classy

(Having said that, even reading halfway through Orwell's Politics and the English Language pretty much sinks the wafty rhetoric of The God Delusion, so)

i wasn't implying that all folks his age get more ornery and stupid... just that i think that might be a factor in this particular case

i also agree that his prominence as a public intellectual has probably gone to his head in bad ways

the bottom line is that i don't judge all of his work by the way he is at present, which i agree is pretty odious

even george takei's twitter is odious sometimes though.

I think one reason why he seems weird to us (I mean, most of us on this thread think he's weird as far as I can see) is because a lot of us have probably ingested, borne in mind whether or not we've stuck with, a certain amount of Marxism and other ideas from the political left wing, and he hasn't.

Dawkins' atheism and scientism codes as left-wing (because anti-Christian) in the world of Facebook memes, but it's worth remembering that he was an anti-Marxist "apolitical" type whose ideas and arguments were congruent with the sociobiologists and ev psych theorists that became conventional wisdom in the Reagan/Thatcher era. His political opponents from that era, like Richard Lewontin or (to a lesser extent) Stephen Jay Gould were far more in tune with modern liberal / progressive politics. He mocked their humanist impulses at the time, and I'm sure another couple of decades at Oxford haven't given him any greater affinity for the underprivileged.

It's about as surprising to see Dawkins stomp on modern sensibilities about rape as it would be for Camille Paglia or pre-Obama Andrew Sullivan.

I think one reason why he seems weird to us (I mean, most of us on this thread think he's weird as far as I can see) is because a lot of us have probably ingested, borne in mind whether or not we've stuck with, a certain amount of Marxism and other ideas from the political left wing, and he hasn't.

― cardamon, Wednesday, August 20, 2014 2:02 PM (6 hours ago)

i dunno, i mean i've absorbed plenty of left wing political ideology (even agreed with some of it), and my dislike of dawkins has nothing to do with that. i find him intellectually incurious, arrogant to the point of self-delusion, and depressingly naive in his failure to see religious intolerance as a symptomatic expression of a boundless & fundamental human capacity for intolerance in general. 20th century history of marxist revolution & government should be sufficient to show that religion is hardly alone in its capacity to motivate violence.

Also, 20th-C history has no shortage of scientists happily contributing to Mass Evil.

Ya but Oppenheimer thought he was Shiva.

Only after the fact

I always imagine him adding a "mua-ha-ha-ha-ha" at the end.

i was vicious and snotty about dawkins back when i was 17 and pro-iraq-war, it's like my one intellectual constant

plasmon otm tho, he is an avatar of neoliberalism. the contempt for belief in anything but the straight line of progress and the totalization of science seems kinda how-do-you-say fundamental to the Whole Thing.

I always imagine him adding a "mua-ha-ha-ha-ha" at the end.

lol.