Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

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charles dickens

I burned The Pickwick Papers!

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?

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.

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)

Apart from Darwin?

- 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.

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

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.

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)

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.

The selfish gene idea is a very clever gimmick. Like a photographic negative, it doesn't actually add any new details to the picture, but it still gives the impression of being starkly and startlingly different from the original.

That can be a useful trick, in that by swapping the foreground and background, and making light what was dark, it emphasizes their unity and interchangeability. But once you've seen the trick, you have all of it. It doesn't tend to lead anywhere or suggest anything new. But it does teach you to shift emphasis more fluidly from genes to organisms and back again.

The concept of memes is a somewhat better trick, but the jury is out on it. Memes are not useful as science, but as a new metaphor. New metaphors can be very powerful catalysts for new thoughts. When Newton published his physical laws he indirectly gave birth to the metaphor of a clockwork universe. That new metaphor excited people and led to a lot of intellectual ferment and invention. In many ways Newton's laws catalyzed the Enlightenment. Darwin's theory altered our view of the universe almost as much, by placing us squarely in the animal kingdom.

Memes are Dawkins's bid to change our metaphorical view of human culture. Rather than have us be the wise creators and manipulators of ideas, he would locate the genesis of ideas in random variation and turn humans into their unwitting vessels. So far, he has not succeeded, but it is still early on in the game.

If I had to guess, I'd say that in 25 years the concept of memes will be a quaint relict of the past that only a few speicalists and crackpots have ever heard of. The problem has been that, as a metaphor, meme theory has not opened any paths of thought we want to follow and develop. We can't seem to wring any value out of it. Maybe that will come later.

As for the anti-christ thing, that's long odds.

Originality may not be the point though - writing a clear and persuasive summary of the status quo that is accessible to the general reader, particularly given the unfashionable nature of some of the "social science" implications, is an achievement that deserves a fair bit of kudos in its own right. Dawkins is frequently credited with ideas that are not his, but he has never claimed they were, and it is unfair that he is sometimes rubbished on the grounds that some of the ideas his over-enthusiastic fans credit him with are not his own.

I do think that Dawkins is on VERY shaky ground with his current notion that as conscious beings we can transcend our genes though. Where can the motives for such transcendence originate?

Are you talking about something other than what he said in The Selfish Gene? That our genetic code just predisposes us to certain behaviours, but that the human brain is such a powerful and flexible organ that we use it for things it didn't adapt to do? Like wear condoms. I don't think that's such a controversial, mystical notion.