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Because I like what he's saying there :-). The man's a good scientist, the selfish gene is a fantastic concept that really strips out a lot of intellectual clutter and focuses you on an underlying dynamic of evolution and memes are useful (if far more nebulous) concepts. Dawkins can probably be blamed for the explosion in viral marketing.
But he's still an arsehole. I see him as an atheist fundamentalist, just as immovable as any religious fundamentalist. He's like it with lots of his pet theories though, just check out the long running and bitter battle with Gould over gradual evolution or punctured equilibrium evolution.
My lab has its more philosophical moments and one of our recent ones was on the nature of science. It's tempting, and very heady, to think that science = truth. It doesn't though. Science is observing and building models based on observation of what we think is going on. Any good scientist would ditch his model in favour of another one provided the new model did a better job of making sense of the data. Dawkins doesn't let go so easily and takes the battle into areas where making models is rather difficult.
(conversely, belief = truth isn't correct either. Religious models of the observable universe tend not to be changed so frequently)
But he's still an arsehole. I see him as an atheist fundamentalist, just as immovable as any religious fundamentalist. He's like it with lots of his pet theories though, just check out the long running and bitter battle with Gould over gradual evolution or punctured equilibrium evolution.
My lab has its more philosophical moments and one of our recent ones was on the nature of science. It's tempting, and very heady, to think that science = truth. It doesn't though. Science is observing and building models based on observation of what we think is going on. Any good scientist would ditch his model in favour of another one provided the new model did a better job of making sense of the data. Dawkins doesn't let go so easily and takes the battle into areas where making models is rather difficult.
(conversely, belief = truth isn't correct either. Religious models of the observable universe tend not to be changed so frequently)
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