Dawkins finds a new way to clown things up

[chveik]

its literally public you griffin

edit: sorry for calling you a griffin. i don't even really know what it means. mythological bird thing, what? how does that relate to the situation. nonsense.

it was 'directed' at dawkins/pullman, people that think twitter is some sort of salon where they exchange bon mots

[madhair60]

oh i'm sorry i totally misunderstood. forgive me

[who cares]

I remember him arguing, back before he had disgraced himself in the court of popular opinion, that The X-Files had a bad moral because it was endless stories about "and so the skeptic was wrong once again, the truth really is out there in a sort of magical way that science is wrong to doubt". This has stayed with me as a fairly reasonable point, or at least not a point to dismiss out of hand. The same thing really bothered me about Lost, for example.

It's an interesting point. I suppose the pattern here is, in the X Files (I've never seen it) and in the Bible, mysterious, inexplicable events apparently happen, and I expect he's bothered by the same thing in Metamorphosis. I wonder what he thinks of the story of Goldilocks- "those bears would never be able to make porridge! >:("

He's a reductionist. I'm not especially interested in anything he has to say about anything really.

I remember The Selfish Gene goes into a lot of detail about cuckoos and other brood parasites

Actually that sounds fascinating.

[TrenterPercenter]

He's a reductionist. I'm not especially interested in anything he has to say about anything really.

Hmmm not really; he is a positivist and a rationalist.

Actually that sounds fascinating.

Yeah don't be put off by his modern day twitter behaviour and even most of his new atheist stuff; The Selfish Gene, Nice Guys Come First and The Blind Watchmaker (which is basically earlier version of The Greatest Show on Earth) as brilliant and fascinating. 

[Neville Chamberlain]

The Blind Watchmaker is the best science book I've ever read and helped made me understand almost overnight the mechanisms behind evolution at a much deeper than superficial level.

Anyone put off by his more recent 'atheist' stuff might be interested in his more overlooked book Unweaving the Rainbow, which came out in 1998 and explores the relationship between art and science. As much as I liked The God Delusion at the time, I think Unweaving the Rainbow, by not being such a balls-to-the-floor tirade against religion, is much more powerful and insightful.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

The thing is that Dawkins doesn't hate fiction and art. Or whatever stereotype he might seem to fall into. It's philosophy he hates and for reasons most people seem to share.

He's a big poetry and literature buff, pretty well read and sincere about it. It's what he says on the topic that is so strange/maddening. One thing is he seems to genuinely want to elevate pop science writers to the status of canonically great writers. This might be another example of bad faith since he's a kingpin in the popular science realm himself, but I'm not so sure.

There are far more people who are dismissive and debasing of the value of the arts than Dawkins and they tend to be able to make their opinions look more reason than "why did Shakespeare think these three old women knew the future? Feminism again I suppose" or whatever he'll cook up next week. People who want to reduce it to a cultural/social function or utility in personal development are more wide spread and unfortunately people take them more seriously than Dickie Dorko.

[madhair60]

don't reward Dawkins' bigotry by praising his piece of shit books. he's a worthless old moron who should hurry up and void. thanks

[MojoJojo]

It's annoying he named memes memes. While the idea that ideas and concepts can be influenced by evolution like principals is fine, genes act in a very specific mathematical way. That's what allowed Mendel to infer the existence of genes long before DNA was discovered. What a lot of the Selfish Gene is about is essentially how that maths works, and how complex evolutionary behaviour can be derived from the exchange and reproduction of discrete units.

Which makes Dawkin making memes analogous to genes particularly jarring. It's like he's taken the one thing from evolution in life that doesn't apply to ideas/concepts and slapped it on. It's just a bit odd.

[thenoise]

You are being extreme, most people in the world don't care about Twitter and don't need to in order read and enjoy his works. He is no worse than anyone else on Twitter, but at his age he should stay off it.

A lot more people have read his tweets than have picked up one of his books.