Random Access - Darwin became a pigeon-fancier?

knirirr's late PhD supervisor was the fellow Dawkins nicked all his ideas on evolution and that from.

I don't think I like his style very much, Dawkins, but I can see why he gets so annoyed. I did like when a muslim convert chappie accused him of "dressing his women like whores", though, I thought D was going to punch him when, quivering with righteous indignation, he retorted "I don't dress women, they dress themselves!!"

I'm fairly sure he's still saying memetics is just a model. Susan Blackmore is the one who's taken that one and run with it.

I'm also reliably informed he writes selection is working on genes, rather than holding the phenotype as the be-all-and-end-all.

Ah, I see - I thought you were saying Dawkins was saying that.
I'm not a scientist myself, unfortunately, so I'm probably a bit stupid, but I don't think that, generally, there's any way to prove that sort of thing beyond a doubt (same with most stuff in science, imo)...

If Prof D is a "second-rate intellect" then I must be very, very stupid indeed. Certainly he's not up to Hamilton, but I don't think the man's a dolt.

Well, I'll see what someone whose PhD was all about that has to say, I'm sure I won't be able to understand it myself.

Oh, that's a shame. I'm ok with my position on his religion.

...but there again, if andrewhickey thinks that a professor from my university is "stupid" (rather than, say incorrect, or he disagrees with him or whatever), what on earth must he think of me?

Have you seen gavinorland.com? Puts me off the D, to be honest. Secularism is one thing, actively despising those who choose to practise is another.

Hold on a mo - didn't he write a whole book about the importance of the phenotype?

I think selection at the level of genes is far less important than selection at the level of the organism...

Why do you think that? I'm not clear on what that really means.

Say you have a worker bee which forgoes reproduction to help raise its sisters - you can explain that readily from a gene-selection point of view (although you have to go into haplodiploidy, multiple paternity, conflicting genetic interests where workers sometimes "cheat" and have their own daughters, and so on, but I don't think any of that changes the basic point) but what is the equivalent "selection at the level of the organism" explanation?

Yeah, I do like that bit. :)

I know nothing of the sciencely stuff of which you speak, but sight unseen (well, except for the photos you posted, but still...) I like Andrew because he made up a totally awesome ditty for you while he made you tea.

Ha! This entry make me snarf root beer.

Also, reason #345,642 that Andrew is my alternate-universe double. :D

I watched his Enemies of Reason show a while back, where he was ranting about complementary medicine.

As I was watching it, I did finding myself thinking that although I'm entirely in agreement that homeopathy and reflexology are total cobblers operating purely through the placebo effect, if I was a believer in those therapies, I probably wouldn't have been at all convinced otherwise by the programme.

How much of that, though, is a result of the basic conceit of the television programme? I fear it's like when making something about the Lib Dems, journalists will try to pitch things in the relative closeness to Lab or Con because that is their story, even though people like me then sit shouting "what the flying f-- are you on about, the purple parties could f--ing MERGE you can't fit a postage stamp between the b-----s" at the screen. A mixture of how tightly controlled in a few peoples hands our media is and how sheeplike most programme-making is.

For Dawkins, science versus invisible friends in the sky is the 'controversy' that you pretty much have to accept as the terms of media debate on evolution stuff, I suspect to keep the TV commissioners and producers happy. And perhaps because they want to resell the show to networks in the USA who are more under theological pressure than we are here. And perhaps he plays up to that 'controversy' since it gets him profile and gets an alternative to blind faith onto tv and maybe reaching some people who would otherwise find it harder to question what they were brought up on.

He's not good at arguing things to the kids; but then, how much experience of teaching in a school classroom does he get? How good would I be at persuading them of something? And how censored would the show have been if he had been honest enough to have told thirteen year old theists that their beliefs were a load of f---ing b---s and their parents and priests were full of shite??

I tend to the theory that, like Peter Tatchell, I do not entirely agree with him but if he did not exist we would desparately need to invent him.

Read this http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html

Terry Eagleton reviews The God Delusion and rips it to shreds.

What bothers me about arguments like Dawkins' and Christopher Hitchens' and that whole crowd of evangelical atheists is that they're fundamentally intellectually dishonest. In the first philosophy class I ever took at university, it was drummed into our heads that, when arguing against a particular theory, you should present that theory in it's best light. Argue against your opponents' BEST arguments. Whereas Dawkins et al. seem to base their works on the construction of all people of faith as people who take their Bible/Koran/Torah literally and have no capacity for independent thought.

I also find the whole notion, argued by many an evangelical atheist, that anyone who does believe in God (or is on the fence) is stupid very offensive. I don't know if I believe in God, but my uncle Paddy (who goes to mass every day and is pro-gay marriage because grownups don't just blindly follow the pope) is really, really smart.