He classes Texas gov Rick Perry as an “uneducated fool,” as if the horde of educated fools in office in recent years have been a shower of blessings.
In “Attention Governor Perry: Evolution is a fact” (August 24, 2011), in response to a Washington Post question on US prez hopeful Rick Perry, Richard Dawkins replied
The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.
Are autocratic systems better? That is, are any of these Americans as objectively harmful to their own people as the leaders of North Korea, Libya, or Syria? Granted, Perry, Bachmann, and Palin are not suited to Dawkins’ Oxonian tastes, but how many American voters think that’s a problem?
He then goes on to praise the aristocratic Brit toff Darwin, and the wonders of his theory,
Darwin’s idea is arguably the most powerful ever to occur to a human mind. The power of a scientific theory may be measured as a ratio: the number of facts that it explains divided by the number of assumptions it needs to postulate in order to do the explaining.
even as researchers treat it with more and more caution, due to fundamental problems with the evidence or are otherwise forced to talk nonsense .
Like any autocrat worldwide, Dawkins iterates endlessly anew the wonders of Darwin’s theory – as if the theory itself compels assent without evidence. If Americans want more of that, on just about any subject, they can vote for the candidates he approves.
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