If You Meet Richard Dawkins On The Road… – Daily Kos

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AMERICAN NEWSApr 21, 2021 8:47 PM EST

AHA strips Richard Dawkins of Humanist of the Year award after famed author criticizes transgenderism

It was also not my intent to ally in any way with Republican bigots in US now exploiting this issue."

Too late.

American Humanist Association Board Statement Withdrawing Honor from Richard Dawkins

He isalso a bigot.Who would ever suggest such a thing?! (Smug Arrogant Look) Im not going to post his vile, bigoted remarks here. Read them for yourself.

KPFA cancels Richard Dawkins speech because of his tweets about Islam

Well of course he does. Bigots are usually the last people to find out they are bigots.

Ive beensaying this in the last 2 or 3 diaries. I wasexcoriatied and subjected to abusefrom some ignorant individuals,not everyone, just those who believe Dawkins is a legitimate scientist. I get the sense themajority of the commenters here might preferto keep their personal beliefs to themselves, and no wonder, if the vile rancor I was subjected to is any metric, after being beaten down and ridiculed for merely stating an actual fact:Atheism is just another unsubstantiated belief, nothing more, andIm just an agnostic, who wouldnt?

Im no stranger to it.Ive worked with convicted felons, gangbangers and people with severe substance use disorders.I can handleinternet trolls. Idont believe I must condemn all beliefs of others that I dont share, which is apparently what one must do to be a Good Militant Anti-Theist. Again, Im just an agnostic, and I dont know any more than anyone else. Gnosis. Look it up.This is the agnostic position, just like Socrates. Any view you happen to holdis a belief, unless you can back it up with proof.And I really dont care forbelief. It is a very low level of consciousness. You either know something or you dont. I know I dont know about the existence or non-existence of any such spiritual beliefs - and I have never read Dawkins until now, and now that I have, Im shocked how accurate my take on this crackpot was.And of course the bigot never thinks hes a bigot. Dawkins is nothing more than what I said, a bigot and a quack. Pseudoscience and theories that are controversial and border on Junk science for the ignorant public

When giants likeE.O. Wilson and Steven Jay Gould ripyou a new one, stick a fork in yourself, youredone, as far as serious science is concerned. And E.O. Wilson is Serious Evolution Science and natural selection is a very complex operation: Game theory.

Scientists, plural, dont like him, and they just volunteered their opinions, very unusual for scientists and academics. I certainly have no inhibition about ripping Dawkins as a fraud and a crackpot, and bigot, because he is, and I studied Wilson. And there may be one or two things Dawkins gets right, thats not enough. I agree with the T-shirt but thats nothing new. 40 years ago this was obvious as DNA came into its own and Mitochondrial DNA was first as evidence in a trial. EVIDENCE

I realize this might cause all kinds of pearl-clutching and gnashing of the teeth. What a shame, the truth often hurts. John Maynard Smith never heard of Sayres Law. And he was British.Academic politics makes real politics look like a tea party.This is true, and Ive experienced it many times but academics are loathe to allow the public to see this side of it.

Sayres Law: Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.

The late British biologist John Maynard Smith (1920-2004) is famous for applying game theory to the study of natural selection. In 1973 Maynard Smith formalised a central concept in game theory called the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS). His ideas, presented in books such as 'Evolution and the Theory of Games', were enormously influential and led to a more rigorous scientific analysis and understanding of interactions between living things.[Listener: Richard Dawkins; date recorded: 1997]TRANSCRIPT: I think that the... the article in the Science of the People... sorry, by the Science for the People, people in, I think, the New York Review of Books, of which I think both [Richard] Lewontin and [Stephen Jay] Gould were signatures of this, was disgraceful, because it didn't... the point is, you can disagree with people, you can disagree with your colleagues as passionately as you like, but you can't go around calling them Fascists and enemies and so on. You have to treat it as an intellectual disagreement. And so I think that the whole of that business, leading up to pouring water over him at the... at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, I think all this was... was ridiculous. But it was predictable.

British scientists don't like Richard Dawkins, finds study that didn't even ask questions about Richard Dawkins

Most British scientists cited in study feel Richard Dawkins' work misrepresents science

Although the researchers did not ask questions about Dawkins, 48 scientists mentioned him during in-depth interviews without prompting, and nearly 80 percent of those scientists believe that he misrepresents science and scientists in his books and public engagements. This group included 23 nonreligious scientists and 15 religious scientists.

Elaine Howard Ecklund, the study's principal investigator and the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences at Rice, said that some scientists, independent of their religious beliefs, do not view Dawkins as a good representative because they believe he conveys "the wrong impression about the borders of scientific inquiry."

"Scientists differ in their view of where such borders rest," said David Johnson, an assistant professor at the University of Nevada in Reno and the paper's lead author. "And they may even view belief in a deity as irrational, but they do not view questions related to the existence of deities or 'the sacred' as within the scope of science."

The investigation into science's public image didn't even ask about the atheist professor, but it got an answer anyway. Very unusual. Academics eschew controversy.

I had never looked into Dawkins before this because I dont do Junk Science.And thats all Dawkins does. Any so called scientist who is that certain of his own bullshit is never right about anything. A charlatan.

Its the publish or die rule, and sometimes all they can publish is bullshit.I never needed him to tell me that Intelligent Design was anything more than what it was:Bullshit. But his response to that Bullshit was more bullshit of his own. And no one cares now anyway.Hitchens was not a clown. His anti-theism was never anything that impressed me, but at least he had an excuse: Hewasan actual journalist, and alcoholic, and a very unhappy man. Punching down is just not something agood person does,and attacking Mother Theresa, what an embarrassment. My opinion of Dawkins was always less than zero. Now Im feeling less kindly about Hitchens, but let the poor man rest in peace. We know hes not in heaven, or hell. The Jews dont even believe in the whackHeaven and Hell the earlyChristian Church sold after Jesus was allegedly crucified.I doubt Jesus did, if he even was a historical person. No one knows. Thats why they call it faith, and belief. You can disagree, youre wrong. So is your God, Dickie Dawkins. Hofstadfter once told the class, when asked about the speed of light: To a photon, space is infinitely thin. Ametaphor, but thats not what Dawkins is doing. Some clowns like the implications but its just a piss poor theory.Gene-centric evolution? Horseshit. Dawkins has no understanding of natural selection, or Darwin.

I expect few here have familiarity with the subject, and sadly, your PhD does not impress. Jordan Petersen has a PhD. So does David Duke. Im just a High School dropout with a GED, likeMike Perry. He did alright for a drop out with a GED. One of the smartest people I know, and I only know smart people, people who can learnand understand the nature of knowledge and understanding.Tolerant people with lots of experience.Lots of experience. Neurodiversity.

The gene-centric view has been opposed by Ernst Mayr, Stephen Jay Gould, David Sloan Wilson, and philosopher Elliott Sober. An alternative, multilevel selection (MLS), has been advocated by E. O. Wilson, David Sloan Wilson, Sober, Richard E. Michod,[31] and Samir Okasha.[31]

Writing in the New York Review of Books, Gould has characterized the gene-centered perspective as confusing book-keeping with causality. Gould views selection as working on many levels, and has called attention to a hierarchical perspective of selection. Gould also called the claims of Selfish Gene "strict adaptationism", "ultra-Darwinism", and "Darwinian fundamentalism", describing them as excessively "reductionist". He saw the theory as leading to a simplistic "algorithmic" theory of evolution, or even to the re-introduction of a teleological principle.[32] Mayr went so far as to say "Dawkins' basic theory of the gene being the object of evolution is totally non-Darwinian."[33]

Gould also addressed the issue of selfish genes in his essay "Caring groups and selfish genes".[34] Gould acknowledged that Dawkins was not imputing conscious action to genes, but simply using a shorthand metaphor commonly found in evolutionary writings. To Gould, the fatal flaw was that "no matter how much power Dawkins wishes to assign to genes, there is one thing that he cannot give them direct visibility to natural selection."[34] Rather, the unit of selection is the phenotype, not the genotype, because it is phenotypes that interact with the environment at the natural-selection interface. So, in Kim Sterelny's summation of Gould's view, "gene differences do not cause evolutionary changes in populations, they register those changes."[35] Richard Dawkins replied to this criticism in a later book, The Extended Phenotype, that Gould confused particulate genetics with particulate embryology, stating that genes do "blend", as far as their effects on developing phenotypes are concerned, but that they do not blend as they replicate and recombine down the generations.[11]

Since Gould's death in 2002, Niles Eldredge has continued with counter-arguments to gene-centered natural selection.[36]Eldredge notes that in Dawkins' book A Devil's Chaplain, which was published just before Eldredge's book, "Richard Dawkins comments on what he sees as the main difference between his position and that of the late Stephen Jay Gould. He concludes that it is his own vision that genes play a causal role in evolution," while Gould (and Eldredge) "sees genes as passive recorders of what worked better than what".[37]

Selecting Richard Dawkins as your personal fountain of truth is a religion with an ideology of intolerance.

Like Dawkins theory

I see no reason to stop exposing this charlatan, and I dont believe in much. Less than any atheist at least, and Im not hostile to any religions, or other ridiculous beliefs. Buddhism isnt religion. Academics can disagree about a great many things, but definitions are the one thing that must be reached by consensus. Definition of terms and classification ARE how science is done. science. Euglena may not be definable, is it an animal or a vegetable? But the rest of it is pretty well defined, or it aint science. Its religion.

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If You Meet Richard Dawkins On The Road... - Daily Kos