Eric Holloway: When we apply Dawkins’s “blind evolution” explanation of the abilities exhibited by insects to the real world engineering, all we get is fancy knob twiddlers.
Tag: Richard Dawkins
A petition is going the rounds urging that Richard Dawkins be allowed to speak at Trinity College
ID types are urging people to sign the petition. Sign it if you like Uncommon Descent. Because we are just so NOT Cancel Culture.
Richard Dawkins is getting canceled again
Apparently, when Richard Dawkins said he was an atheist, some people didn’t realize that he rejected Islam along with Christianity. The stark reality is that the post-Christian student does not want to win a debate but rather to cancel it.
(Reformed) New Scientist 3: The Selfish Gene Is No Longer Cool
Readers may recall that New Scientist published an article three days ago on 13 ways we need to “rethink the theory of nature.” Their Number 3 rethink is … Move Over, Selfish Gene. It’s replaced not just by kin selection now but by cultural group selection. Most of the article is paywalled but here’s the Read More…
Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins on free will
They think it’s an illusion, of course. Dawkins recommends Richard Dennett on the subject but Dennett also thinks that consciousness is an illusion. Michael Egnor would say, if your proposition is that consciousness is an illusion, then you don’t have a proposition.
Richard Dawkins, as seen apart from proxy Darwin worship
It also felt like the truest, most human work I could do: to love someone into whomever they would become. Meanwhile, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins tweeted that it was immoral for a pregnant woman to knowingly carry to term a child with Down syndrome…
Petition: Rename Darwinian Ronald Fisher lecture due to his support for eugenics
Sort of thing that had to happen eventually. Old and bust: “According to geneticist and author Richard Dawkins, Fisher [1890-1962] was the greatest biologist since Charles Darwin.” Old and bust, it seems.
AI replacing humans is consistent with Dawkins’s naturalist philosophy
Which is where the wheels come off.
Excerpt from new ID book: Evolution and Intelligent Design in a Nutshell
Anderson: To my surprise, Dawkins responded rather glibly that we have a pretty good idea how life started. Yes, there are some challenges, he acknowledged, but…
Why won’t Richard Dawkins debate William Lane Craig?
The new atheist project appears to be failing anyway. It might help Dawkins’s numbers if he did debate. But not our business, of course.
Expert contra Dawkins, why eugenics wouldn’t really work
David Curtis: We can now measure genetic potential directly from genetic markers and what we know from this is that these genetic predictors perform extremely badly. We can also tell that there are many important, very rare genetic variants which we will never be able to identify.
Jerry Coyne jumps into the Dawkins eugenics row
Contrary to Coyne’s and Dawkin’s claims, dog breeding is DEvolution for dogs. It usually works that way, as Michael Behe points out in Darwin Devolves. Dogs are bred by humans at the expense of their genetic health.
Richard Dawkins says eugenics works because he assumes we are just like animals
At one fell swoop, Dawkins exposes another frequent weakness of naturalist atheism: direct conflict with facts. Eugenics does not work for humans. Unlike animals, we make personal choices, which could be based on reason and free will or on the apparent lack thereof. And those choices confound the ambitions of others.
Dawkins raises an issue without intending to: Can one “outgrow” God without “outgrowing” morality?
Rebecca McLaughlin: To Dawkins’s credit, he comes dangerously close to acknowledging that religious belief is correlated with better moral outcomes—though he would like to think humans are better than that (117). He finds it rather patronizing to say, “Of course you and I are too intelligent to believe in God, but we think it would be a good idea if other people did!” (122).
David Bentley Hart offers an honest assessment of Richard Dawkins’s new book
The book is Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide. Hart thinks Dawkins has finally found his authorial voice but you had better read the rest.