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Richard Dawkins

Philosopher Mary Midgeley (1919–2018) on scientism

At RealClearScience: Science is a method and discipline, but Scientism is something more – it establishes a set of beliefs by which to view things. It sees science as “realistic” or “just the facts”, like some objective totem. What’s more, Midgley argued that Scientism is invariably aligned with some kind of excessive reductionism, where everything is reduced to neurons or evolutionary psychology, for instance. Read More ›

Dawkins’s claim: “every gene delivers approximately the same tree of life” contested at Nature Portfolio Ecology & Evolution

You know, Dawkins may be losing his shine. New Scientist was making similar types of noise last October. It's now okay to say when there's something wrong with this stuff. Read More ›

Alister McGrath imagines Richard Dawkins and C.S. Lewis in conversation

Nathan Muse: Regarding faith and reason, McGrath does an excellent job showing how many of Dawkins’ arguments for atheism can easily be turned on their head to prove the opposite and that this actually tells the reader something about the meaning of life. Read More ›

Putting Richard Dawkins’s evolution claims to a computer science test

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. Read More ›

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. Read More ›

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. Read More ›

(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 gist of #3: But kin selection cannot explain why humans are so nice to strangers… Some researchers think the solution lies in an idea called cultural group selection. Forget shared genes, they argue: selection can favour cooperative groups if the people within them share enough culture. The idea is controversial because to work it requires that groups remain culturally distinct. As critics point out, people 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. Read More ›

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... Read More ›

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. Read More ›

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... Read More ›