Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

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Name one historical figure/arist/thinker who hasn't/still does not disturb people

erm, just bloody loads of them, dude.

― enrique (Enrique), Monday, 17 November 2003 14:36 (twenty-two years ago)

No what gave you that idea? Just the opposite!

― Pete S, Monday, 17 November 2003 14:36 (twenty-two years ago)

Enrique - Like?

― Pete S, Monday, 17 November 2003 14:37 (twenty-two years ago)

Hang on, so yr problem is with anyone delving into the mysteries of the universe?

no, just with the chest-beating idiocy contained in statements such as the one quoted by momus.

― enrique (Enrique), Monday, 17 November 2003 14:37 (twenty-two years ago)

Enrique - Like?

the beatles
charles dickens

― enrique (Enrique), Monday, 17 November 2003 14:38 (twenty-two years ago)

Grah, that comment was directed to Pete S, Enrique! I completely agree with you abt the crapness of the article linked to by Momus.

― Ricardo (RickyT), Monday, 17 November 2003 14:40 (twenty-two years ago)

People burned Beatles records!

I burned The Pickwick Papers!

― N. (nickdastoor), Monday, 17 November 2003 14:40 (twenty-two years ago)

Pete S, it was this sentence:

It's his total denial of the mysteries of life and human consciousness

Do you mean that life is intrinsically mysterious, and the study of it should not be attempted? Or have I completely misread you?

― Ricardo (RickyT), Monday, 17 November 2003 14:42 (twenty-two years ago)

i spose they did N. i spose i mean 'driller killer' disturbing.

― enrique (Enrique), Monday, 17 November 2003 14:42 (twenty-two years ago)

let's burn the rachel papers, how can that not bring abt world peace?

― mark s (mark s), Monday, 17 November 2003 14:42 (twenty-two years ago)

Enrique - have you never listened to 'Rocky Raccoon'??

― N. (nickdastoor), Monday, 17 November 2003 14:46 (twenty-two years ago)

oh for FRITH's SAKE!!

― mark s (mark s), Monday, 17 November 2003 14:46 (twenty-two years ago)

I said hasn't (i.e when they were around) or still doesn't disturb people, You're wrong on BOTH counts.
1.The Beatles - Tons of people were disturbed by the Beatles when they first appeared, and some never got used to them (e.g Paul Johnson). The music, the beat, the haircut. And later on when they did stuff like Revolution 9 and Strawberry Fields, and the "We're bigger than Jesus" thing, they werte pilloried. Even today you'll find loads of wacko people continuing to look for hidden satanic messages in the grooves, and claiming they're agents of Satan. Plus i've lost count of the number of cultural commentators i've read who blame the Beatles and the musical revolution they created for The Decline of Western Civillization, That's today!
2.Charles Dickens - When he was writing he was attacked by many for portraying 'unseemly subjects', i.e. degredation, the poor. This really did disturb the comlacent classes of that time.
And today, he disturbs people with the degree of sentimentality he is prone to; 'How could such a great writer feel that way', etc.
Any more? I'm telling you there's no-one.

― Pete S, Monday, 17 November 2003 14:50 (twenty-two years ago)

That's 'complacent classes', natch.

― Pete S, Monday, 17 November 2003 14:51 (twenty-two years ago)

Ricardo - i applaud people who are curious enough to delve;that's what we're programmed to do. But every great scientist/thinker worth his salt has some humility in the face of the vast complexities of the universe (as embodied, i think, by the staggering fact of OUR existence.)He simply and fatuosly denies there's any mystery at all!

― Pete S, Monday, 17 November 2003 14:57 (twenty-two years ago)

So your problem is not with his science, but with his OTT antireligion stuff? (I find the two things easy to decouple, but I can see why they might not be)

― Ricardo (RickyT), Monday, 17 November 2003 15:02 (twenty-two years ago)

Like i said up top, it's HIM who's hawking this stuff around the tv studios; HE doesn't ask us to seperate them, He doesn't say 'This is my populist, no-brainer stuff, please don't assosciate it with the profound scientific thinker to be found in these books.' For me, he's on one unbroken polemical mission - and he'ill do whatever's necessary to make his argument fit this.

― Pete S, Monday, 17 November 2003 15:08 (twenty-two years ago)

Zorn = adj. meaning "Destroyed, murdered; suffered a catastrophe" !!!

― Andrew L (Andrew L), Monday, 17 November 2003 15:09 (twenty-two years ago)

It's difficult not to be anti-religion when your area of study conflict directly with relgious dogma.

You can ignore religion all you want in your studies but the minute you go public, relgious people will start telling you that you are wrong.

― Jarlr'mai (jarlrmai), Monday, 17 November 2003 15:11 (twenty-two years ago)

this isn't the time or the place, but i once made a brilliant fuck up in re frith. at work experience at a Major Broadsheet Paper, on the arts desk, i excellently confused the clever, musicologist mercury music prize frith with... the editor of heat [ie 'who's the mercury music prize head judge?' me: 'the editor of heat'], when trying to be helpful/clever. great days!

― enrique (Enrique), Monday, 17 November 2003 15:14 (twenty-two years ago)

haha the editor of Heat is Fred Frith's brother!

― Andrew L (Andrew L), Monday, 17 November 2003 15:17 (twenty-two years ago)

If you had confused him with the sun god of the rabbits it would have been a much better story, Enrique.

― N. (nickdastoor), Monday, 17 November 2003 15:18 (twenty-two years ago)

I was once giving a lecture about pop music in Stockholm (as you do) and started attacking the Mercury Prize. Someone in the audience asked a question at the end, saying 'I happen to be one of the Mercury Prize judges, and...' it turned out to be Simon Frith himself! He was okay about it, and invited me to his (much superior) lecture about pop music up at the university the following day.

― Momus (Momus), Monday, 17 November 2003 15:18 (twenty-two years ago)

N -- i think it's a great story, and oddly i've never told it to anyone before, and this was two years ago. i'd just sort of forgotten. i'm immensely proud of it. i've never read watership down. part of me thinks heat's choices wd be better, mind you.

― enrique (Enrique), Monday, 17 November 2003 15:20 (twenty-two years ago)

The Universe is far more wondrous to think of in terms of mechanisms that to think of it as the work of some beardy git on a cloud.

why? as i said before, i think dawkins advances a really insulting attitude that as an atheist he is really, really happy (happier than repressed christians for sure!). while its possible to think of the universe as some wondrous chance acccident--it makes more sense to me to think of existence as a horrible mistake.

i am an atheist myself, but i dont pretend i am happy about it. and i have to say that anyone who does is possibly being slightly less than honest with themselves. (that is, i think happiness for an atheist is found DESPITE being an atheist, not because of it)

― ryan (ryan), Monday, 17 November 2003 17:42 (twenty-two years ago)

You've hit the nail on the head, ryan. I wuouldn't have dared say that though. In the current climate we're living in where being religious is generally despised as being dumb or ant-intellectual, atheism seems to be a religion of its own. And the responses, if you question it can be far more vitriolic. Not directed at anyone, you understand.

― Pete S, Monday, 17 November 2003 17:54 (twenty-two years ago)

I think that he's an Athiest first and a scientist second is what causes problems.
On the other hand, even though my personal opinions on evolution (vs.) religion are a bit much to fit into a single ILM post, but suffice it to say, the "We are Ants in a Meaningless Cosmos Theory" is just as dumb and broken as the "Beardy Old Git and his Sidekick 'Satan' Theory"

― Lord Custos Omicron (Lord Custos Omicron), Monday, 17 November 2003 17:57 (twenty-two years ago)

Wondrous does not mean wonderful, just as awesome does not mean awful. A godless world might well be considered wondrous and awesome.

― Momus (Momus), Monday, 17 November 2003 17:59 (twenty-two years ago)

But a wondrous physical universe superimposed onto a just as wonderful spiritual universe is even better.

― Lord Custos Omicron (Lord Custos Omicron), Monday, 17 November 2003 18:00 (twenty-two years ago)

But even Christianity can't offer that. When return, bring sky pie.

― Momus (Momus), Monday, 17 November 2003 18:09 (twenty-two years ago)

Lord Custos never nentioned Christianity. There are hundreds of other religions/forms of spirituality, you know.

― Pete S, Monday, 17 November 2003 18:13 (twenty-two years ago)

Well, I said 'even' Christianity, as if it were the most advanced form of spirituality on offer. That's its opinion of itself, but not mine of it. I would opt for some sort of animism, given the choice. But ultimately I have to go with Voltaire and Dawkins.

― Momus (Momus), Monday, 17 November 2003 19:12 (twenty-two years ago)

'The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism.' (Gore Vidal) I really agree that this is some sort of 'original sin', the place where the idyll of our life on this planet took a wrong turn. The moment when the monotheistic religions started destroying all the local animisms, the god pantheons of Greece and Egypt...

― Momus (Momus), Monday, 17 November 2003 19:15 (twenty-two years ago)

Monotheism and its Discontents, a lecture by Gore Vidal.

― Momus (Momus), Monday, 17 November 2003 19:17 (twenty-two years ago)

why assume something went wrong? why cant we accept that it was shit from the beginning and it can't be fixed?

― ryan (ryan), Monday, 17 November 2003 19:18 (twenty-two years ago)

I completely agree, Momus. The nature of the God of the Old Testament (A vain, shallow, neurotic, masculine, horifically insecure tyrant) is very clear, however we are encouraged to worship/respct that! (I'm reffering to U.S and U.K-ians).
The portrayal of Jehovah in the Old Testament is a literary parody of the absolutist monarchs who littered the Near East at that time, people don't seem to have worked that out.
Once you purge life and human experience of its plurality, and put it under that destructive umbrella, no wonder religion becomes a dried-up shell.
Back to paganism!(Without the unpleasant bits).

― Pete S, Monday, 17 November 2003 19:25 (twenty-two years ago)

I don't think of Dawkins as a great thinker (I think this is a field for incremental progress not big imaginative leaps by great original thinkers) but his books strike me as essentially right, at least in their core subject matter (the cultural memes stuff is ropier, for example). I wish I could agree with Kate, but find his optimism about the consolations of his mechanistic world view pretty unconvincing. Yes there is good stuff about the inevitability of altruism but it is pretty bleak stuff from the perspective of individual human lives having any kind of significance. For that reason I'd love to find a critique that blew him out of the water, but any substantial criticism or even correctives I've read tend to be pretty obvious wishful thinking.

― ArfArf, Monday, 17 November 2003 20:01 (twenty-two years ago)

For someone who's so opposed to any form of supernaturalism, he's sure enamored of the pathetic fallacy.

― chester (synkro), Monday, 17 November 2003 21:02 (twenty-two years ago)

(I think this is a field for incremental progress not big imaginative leaps by great original thinkers)

Apart from Darwin?

― Jarlr'mai (jarlrmai), Monday, 17 November 2003 21:29 (twenty-two years ago)

re: his most famous book was an attempt to explain altruistic behaviour in animals

- But just the fact that this behaviour apparently calls for an 'explanation' is suss - eg, is he trying to say, it can be explained in terms of selfishness? Why does he feel the necessity to do this? Why not explain genocide as a weird deviation of the altruistic impulse? Which, in some senses, it obviously often is - loyalty gone awry. etc etc - questions of perspective. But perhaps I am misunderstanding what you mean by his 'explanation'.

I think the problem with this theory, as with much of evolutionary theory, is excessive confidence. I mean no species is 'perfect' in evolutionary terms. EG birds, the monogamous mating patterns, this is not the perfect evolutionary solution. Not everything can be explained in terms of evolution because there is no perfect species.

― maryann (maryann), Tuesday, 18 November 2003 00:25 (twenty-two years ago)

http://www.hogansheroesfanclub.com/images/photoNewkirkSmall.gif

― anthony kyle monday (akmonday), Tuesday, 18 November 2003 00:49 (twenty-two years ago)

The reasoning is that most animal behaviour is selfish, or at the very least self-interested when you get beyond close kinship groups. This is adequately explained by standard Darwinian theory. However, there is a lot of seemingly aberrant altruistic behaviour, and Dawkins' book was a pretty successful attempt to explain this without throwing out the awesome explanatory power of evolution via natural selection.

I am unsure what you mean by perfection in species, so can't really get to grips with your second paragraph.

― Ricardo (RickyT), Tuesday, 18 November 2003 10:35 (twenty-two years ago)

Lemarck to thread!

― robster (robster), Tuesday, 18 November 2003 11:04 (twenty-two years ago)

The problem is the way most people think of evolution is that there is some goal that the process is striving to achieve ("perfection"), there simply isn't.

Evolution is an accident due to "mistakes" in the genetic copying that occurs during reproduction and that some of these mistakes manifest themselves in the phenotype allowing the organism to take advantage of the environment to the benefit of its reproductive process over other members of the same species.

The evolutionary process is always limited by environmental conditions and a change in these conditions that is too rapid for the species to adapt will result in extinction.

― Jarlr'mai (jarlrmai), Tuesday, 18 November 2003 12:19 (twenty-two years ago)

the assumption that exact replication is proper replication and approximate replication is a mistake is itself mistaken: maybe wobbliness is better than precision?

― mark s (mark s), Tuesday, 18 November 2003 12:23 (twenty-two years ago)

The genetic processes attempt to copy perfectly THEY DO NOT KNOW ABOUT EVOLUTION, THEY ARE NOT SENTIENT it is a side affect of the replication process that happens to work to change a species over time.

― Jarlr'mai (jarlrmai), Tuesday, 18 November 2003 15:45 (twenty-two years ago)

they don't attempt anything THEY ARE NOT SENTIENT

wobbliness is built in down at a much deeper (foamy quantum) level: precision is impossible except as a cultural convention (ie the point you decide it counts-as-perfect)

― mark s (mark s), Tuesday, 18 November 2003 15:54 (twenty-two years ago)

A process "attempts" something whether it is sentient or not (damn human-centric languages getting in the way). I take your point on the quantum "foam" making atomic level precision impossible though.

― Jarlr'mai (jarlrmai), Tuesday, 18 November 2003 16:10 (twenty-two years ago)

>The problem is the way most people think of evolution is that there is some goal that the process is striving to achieve ("perfection"), there simply isn't.

I think I see what you mean here and I think this is a really good and interesting point. But doesn't the scientists attempt to explain animal behaviour in evolutionary terms mean that they think that the failure of evolutionary theory to explain all manifestations of natural life, and especially the behaviour of animals, just reflects a failure by scientists to adequately apply evolutionary theory? I mean, they think that if they just keep struggling, evolutionary theory will eventually explain every behaviour. But the problem with that is that the species haven't evolved perfectly. So do you see what I mean? Even if evolutionary theory could be perfectly applied, there would still be some instances where animal behaviour wasn't explained by it because in these instances, the animal itself just isn't genetically capable of perfect evolutionary behaviour. And since evolutionary theory will never be perfectly applied because that would be a process that approaches conclusion at infinity or whatever, I don't know how to explain that better, we will always be in the situation where, when an animal's behaviour isn't explained by evolutionary theory, we don't know whether it's because we haven't applied the theory correctly or whether it's because that animal has failed to behave in an evolutionarily perfect way.

Basically I think this is probably a really stupid point but maybe someone could just explain to me why.

― maryann (maryann), Wednesday, 19 November 2003 02:57 (twenty-two years ago)

Evolutionary behaviour describes how organisms adapt over generations to increase their prospects of survival in a particular environment. They will not tend to a "perfect" solution for a number of reasons, one being that the environment is not stable.

― ArfArf, Wednesday, 19 November 2003 09:49 (twenty-two years ago)

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