Is this a symptom of the gradual cultural failure of Darwinism?
Way back when, one of life’s great certainties used to be that no matter how obnoxious, prejudiced, jaundiced or snooty Richard Dawkins, the Grand Poobah of Atheism, was, the accolades would continue to roll in.
Alas! Those were the Good Old Days for poor old Richard. Nowadays he is looking more and more like a bewildered T-Rex the day after the Cretaceous extinction event.
Earlier this year Richard was cancelled by the American Humanist Association. It revoked his 1996 humanist of the year award because he had expressed scepticism about trans people in one of his recent tweets…
It turns out that Richard needed his mouth washed out with soap for a very long time. The AHA board declared that he had “over the past several years accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalised groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values”.
Amongst these are Down Syndrome children, although I doubt that the AHA had them in mind. Dominic Lawson, a columnist for the Daily Mail, reports that there have been calls for Random House to stop publishing books by Dawkins.
Ann Farmer, “Richard Dawkins is not just ableist, he’s unscientific” at Mind Matters News
Calls for Random House to stop publishing his books? As if he were Michael Behe or something? Clearly, Darwinism is losing its cultural teflon.
To his credit, Lawson does NOT think Dawkins should be Canceled. But he is only one journalist. There are mobs of Woke out there. People who could not provide an intellectually respectable critique of his work would be happen to see the publisher Cancel it. Stay tuned.
See also: Richard Dawkins goes after people with Down syndrome… again. It’s interesting that, for decades, Dawkins could say the most awful things and still be popular. But there’s some evidence, noted here, that he’s starting to lose his shine, along with Darwinism in general.