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.
Tag: Richard Dawkins
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.
Suzan Mazur: Richard Dawkins heads for Mekong River in Viet Nam
We didn’t know that Suzan Mazur, author of Darwin Overthrown: Hello Mechanobiology, had interviewed Richard Dawkins in Manhattan (2008) let alone that Dawkins is now headed for the Mekong.
Question for readers: In a world where horizontal gene transfer is an important force, what becomes of Dawkins’s Selfish Gene?
The selfish gene is an entity driven by an unadmitted teleological force to replicate itself in offspring. But horizontal gene transfer—hardly taken seriously the day before yesterday—features genes that simply end up on a different string. Is a relentless force of selfishness driving them to do that? Or do they just drift and end up on that string?
New Scientist: Richard Dawkins shows us how to outgrow God
Meanwhile, William Lane Craig replies, God Is the Best Explanation for the Applicability of #Mathematics to the Physical World.
Richard Dawkins’s Darwin Day lecture, 2019
What, him again? And no new, ground-breaking book? Richard Dawkins is one of the best known scientists in the world. He is author of ‘The Selfish Gene’, which upturned our understanding of natural selection, and in 2017 was named the most influential science book of all time. He is also author of ‘The God Delusion’, Read More…
Maybe the Darwinists can’t afford to be quite as unhinged any more?
Remembering science writer Richard Milton: “it was deeply disappointing to find myself being described by a prominent academic, Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins, as “loony,” “stupid,” and “in need of psychiatric help” in response to purely scientific reporting. “
New atheism in decline?
Well, we have heard that astrology is on the rise but not much about new atheism being in decline. A Google Trends graph from 2004 through 2017 shows Sam Harris, rising and Richard Dawkins declining: Dawkins has always been the heart of New Atheism, meaning its decline and his decline are linked at the hip. Read More…
Who knew that Bret Weinstein would be a bigger Darwinist than Richard Dawkins?
Not Paul Nelson, if you go by his account of the discussion between Weinstein, the biology prof driven by “woke” students from Evergreen State University and iconic Darwinist Richard Dawkins: I witnessed something last week that I never thought I’d see. Richard Dawkins, pressed to affirm the explanatory power of Darwinian reasoning for human life, Read More…
Richard Dawkins is annoyed by Muslim prayer chants; seeks secular chaplains
From tipster Ken Francis again, who is currently sitting in for Richard Dawkins’s social secretary and wants us to know that at RT: Question More, ‘Tedious old racist’: Richard Dawkins under fire for dismissing ‘aggressive’ Muslim prayer Best-selling atheist author Richard Dawkins has once again been branded “racist” after he tweeted that the sound of Read More…
Design Disquisitions: Jeffrey Koperski on Two Bad and Two Good Ways to Attack ID (Part 2): Two ‘Good’ Ways
Part two of my series looking at Jeffrey Koperski’s paper ‘Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Design and Two Good Ones’ is now up on my blog. This one is quite in depth, but a couple of interesting issues come up along the way. I examine the concept of soft and hard anomalies in scientific Read More…