Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Topic

Richards Dawkins

“Dawkins believes what he wishes to believe”

Richard Dawkins’ autobiography has been reviewed in the London Spectator: http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/9025021/an-appetite-for-wonder-by-richard-dawkins-review/. The reviewer’s verdict? “He relies just as much on a leap of faith as those religious believers he so keenly affects to despise. His theory also cannot explain how those selfish genes eventually came to evolve the one species on earth which is marked out by a unique capacity for self-obsessed egotism.”

A “remarkable fact”

Let’s take again that quotation out of Richard Dawkins’ “The Greatest Show on Earth (pp. 332-333)”, published as many ages ago as the year 2009, quoted at http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/09/in_debate_brita_1064521.html Leaving pseudogenes aside, it is a remarkable fact that the greater part (95 percent in the case of humans) of the genome might as well not be there, for all the difference it makes. Now, what here Dawkins calls a “remarkable fact”, turns out only three years later to be known (such that even he agrees, as the above link shows) to be totally false. It’s not even close; it’s as large an error as one could make in a propositional statement. Not only that, but, this totally false statement is in an Read More ›

Professor Robert Winston Rejects Determinism in Genetics

The Festival of Science in Liverpool, organised by the prestigious British Association, has certainly produced some fireworks this past week. Following Professor Reiss’s comments, Professor Robert Winston has now criticised ‘science delusions’ and a ‘deterministic’ approach to genetics. Winston is well known through the mainstream media in the UK as a leading geneticist. He accuses militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins of damaging science with their rhetoric, commenting that the new atheism is ‘dangerous,’ ‘irresponsible’ and ‘very divisive.’ Winston comments that; “Far too many scientists including my good friend Richard Dawkins present science as…factually correct. And actually of course that clearly isn’t true.” “I think that…it is actually…irresponsible. I think it poo-poos other people’s views of a universe about which Read More ›