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nickLW comments on In Defense of Tone Arguments - Less Wrong Discussion

24 Post author: OrphanWilde 19 July 2012 07:48PM

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Comment author: nickLW 20 July 2012 03:27:34AM 5 points [-]

Selfish Gene itself is indeed quite sufficient to convince most thinking young people that evolution provides a far better explanation of how we got to be the way we are. It communicated far better than anybody else the core theories of neo-Darwinism which gave rise to evolutionary psychology, by stating bluntly the Copernican shift from group or individual selection to gene selection. Indeed, I'd still recommend it as the starting point for anybody interested in wading into the field of evolutionary psychology: you should understand the fairly elegant underlying theory before doing the deep dive into what is now a far less elegant and organized study (in part because many of its practioners still don't understand the underlying theory).

Dawkins also had some very interesting theories of his own about evolution and animal behavior in Extended Phenotype, and despite his skill as a communicator of science it's a great loss that he largely discontinued his actual research in science.

In Blind Watchmaker he actually expresses quite a bit of understanding and empathy for major creationist arguments, especially the watchmaker argument, in the process of debunking them far better than any evolutionist had ever debunked them before.

Since then, he's gone downhill, becoming by now pedantic and repetitive and shrill. Of course he went downhill from a great height very few of us will ever hope to achieve, but it's sad nevertheless.

Comment author: David_Gerard 21 July 2012 09:07:57PM *  6 points [-]

I thought The Greatest Show On Earth (2010) was fantastic, and I'm currently rereading it. (I recommend this book to everyone. If you thought you understood evolution, you'll understand it better.) The first paragraph of the first chapter summarises just why Dawkins is so generally pissed off with religion these days:

Imagine that you are a teacher of Roman history and the Latin language, anxious to impart your enthusiasm for the ancient world – for the elegiacs of Ovid and the odes of Horace, the sinewy economy of Latin grammar as exhibited in the oratory of Cicero, the strategic niceties of the Punic Wars, the generalship of Julius Caesar and the voluptuous excesses of the later emperors. That’s a big undertaking and it takes time, concentration, dedication. Yet you find your precious time continually preyed upon, and your class’s attention distracted, by a baying pack of ignoramuses (as a Latin scholar you would know better than to say ‘ignorami’) who, with strong political and especially financial support, scurry about tirelessly attempting to persuade your unfortunate pupils that the Romans never existed. There never was a Roman Empire. The entire world came into existence only just beyond living memory. Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, Romansh: all these languages and their constituent dialects sprang spontaneously and separately into being, and owe nothing to any predecessor such as Latin. Instead of devoting your full attention to the noble vocation of classical scholar and teacher, you are forced to divert your time and energy to a rearguard defence of the proposition that the Romans existed at all: a defence against an exhibition of ignorant prejudice that would make you weep if you weren’t too busy fighting it.

As someone noted elsewhere (Ben Goren on Jerry Coyne's site), a lot of why Dawkins is perceived as "shrill" and, e.g., Carl Sagan isn't, despite Sagan's words on religion being at least as uncompromising, is that "Richard is an excited and exciting tenor who sounds like he’s just drank a pot of tea while Carl is a relaxed and relaxing baritone who sounds like he’s just smoked a bowl of pot." (And likely had.) (This is apart from general tone argument considerations, in which merely objecting is dismissed as "shrill" no matter the actual tone.)

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