Philosophers From England

"The journalists would appear to be in an almost literal sense the priests of the modern world. They may not rise precisely to the tremendous responsibility which was laid upon Peter, but at least it can be said that whatever they bind on earth is bound on earth, and whatever they loose on earth is loosed on earth. They have essentially and absolutely the same functions that were employed by the old priests, but their power for deceit is even greater and their responsibility to the world even less. A comparison between the priests and the journalists would be striking in many points. [...] The priest's influence and power consisted almost entirely in the fact that he was the only man who brought news. [...] the corruption of the priesthood occurred at the precise moment in which it changed from a minority organised to impart knowledge into a minority organised to withhold it. The great danger of decadence in journalism is almost exactly the same. Journalism possesses in itself the potentiality of becoming one of the most frightful monstrosities and delusions that have ever cursed mankind. This horrible transformation will occur at the exact instant at which journalists realise that they can become an aristocracy."

"Fools! For I also had my hour; One far fierce hour and sweet: There was a shout about my ears, And palms before my feet."

"When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. With monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings, The devil’s walking parody On all four-footed things."

"Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance."

"Good people with humanist hearts have been pilloried if they don’t subscribe to every jot and tittle of the identitarian gospel. A prime example is the decision last year by the (AHA) to retract its 1996 award to Richard Dawkins as Humanist of the Year. The man who has done more than anyone alive to advance evolutionary biology and the public’s understanding of that science, who has brought the light of atheism to millions of people, and whose vociferous opposition to Donald Trump and Brexit certainly must have burnished his liberal cred became radioactive because of one tweet on transgender issues that the AHA didn’t like. Apparently decades of past good works are erased by 280 characters. Just poof."

"Richard Dawkins was honored in 1996 by the AHA as Humanist of the Year for his significant contributions in this area. Regrettably, Richard Dawkins has over the past several years accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalized groups, an approach antithetical to humanist values. His latest statement implies that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while also simultaneously attacking Black identity as one that can be assumed when convenient. His subsequent attempts at clarification are inadequate and convey neither sensitivity nor sincerity. Consequently, the AHA Board has concluded that Richard Dawkins is no longer deserving of being honored by the AHA, and has voted to withdraw, effective immediately, the 1996 Humanist of the Year award."

"The God Delusion by the atheist writer Richard Dawkins, is remarkable in the first place for having achieved some sort of record by selling over a million copies. But what is much more remarkable than that economic achievement is that the contents – or rather lack of contents – of this book show Dawkins himself to have become what he and his fellow secularists typically believe to be an impossibility: namely, a secularist bigot. (Helpfully, my copy of The Oxford Dictionary defines a bigot as ‘an obstinate or intolerant adherent of a point of view’)."

"Dawkins is inexhaustibly outraged by the fact that religious opinions lead people to terrible crimes. But what, if there is no God, is so peculiarly shocking about these opinions being specifically religious? The answer he supplies is simple: that when religious people do evil things, they are acting on the promptings of their faith but when atheists do so, it's nothing to do with their atheism. He devotes pages to a discussion of whether Hitler was a Catholic, concluding that “Stalin was an atheist and Hitler probably wasn’t, but even if he was… the bottom line is very simple. Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism.” Yet under Stalin almost the entire Orthodox priesthood was exterminated simply for being priests, as were the clergy of other religions and hundreds of thousands of Baptists. The claim that Stalin’s atheism had nothing to do with his actions may be the most disingenuous in the book, but it has competition from a later question, “Why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief [atheism]?”—as if the armies of the French revolution had marched under icons of the Virgin, or as if a common justification offered for China’s invasion of Tibet had not been the awful priest-ridden backwardness of the Dalai Lama’s regime."

"I experience the same sense of absurdity when I listen to a cosmologist like Stephen Hawking telling us that the universe began with a big bang fifteen billion years ago, and that physics will shortly create a 'theory of everything' that will answer every possible question about our universe; this entails the corollary that God is an unnecessary hypothesis. Then I think of the day when I suddenly realized that I did not know where space ended, and it becomes obvious that Hawking is also burying his head in the sand. God may be an unnecessary hypothesis for all I know, and I do not have the least objection to Hawking dispensing with Him, but until we can understand why there is existence rather than nonexistence, then we simply have no right to make such statements. It is unscientific. The same applies to the biologist Richard Dawkins, with his belief that strict Darwinism can explain everything, and that life is an accidental product of matter. I feel that he is trying to answer the ultimate question by pretending it does not exist."

"Dawkins argues that the survival of a segment of DNA is the sole criterion for its successful replication, whence DNA is 'selfish'. This is of course the old 'a chicken is just an egg's way to breed a new egg' line of thinking, dressed up in fancy hi-tech. It is equally possible to give an account of genetics and evolution from the point of view of the organism, leading to what biologist Jack Cohen and I call the 'slavish gene', obsessed with activities that do not damage the organism's survival chances. The selfish gene metaphor is not wrong—in fact, it is intellectually defensible as a debating point. But it diverts our attention rather than adding to our understanding. The relation between genes and organisms is a feedback loop: genes affect organisms via development; organisms affect genes (in the next generation) via natural selection. It is a fallacy to attribute the dynamics of this loop to just one of its components. It is like saying that wage increases cause inflation, but forgetting that price increases fuel demands for higher wages."

"Dawkins retired as “public understanding” professor in 2008, and he is now in his mid-70s. He basks in the knowledge that he is worshipped by many, but he also seems aware that others – including those who would like to be counted among his intellectual allies – have long believed his cask-strength hectoring would have benefited from a splash of water and a willingness to teach rather than preach. You don’t read Dawkins to be converted from faith to science – though that’s possible; you read him to be fortified in your secular beliefs and to be armed against the Dark Side with handy facts, gestures at powerful theories, and rich stores of satirical rhetoric."

"At his best, Dawkins has written with passion, urgency and clarity, and, if crushing the creationists and convincing the enemies of reason of their stupidity has secured him a reputation as something of a one-trick pony, it has been a polished trick and a best-in-show pony."

"All that is necessary for something to evolve, according to Dawkins, is a faithful but imperfect copying mechanism for instructions and a system that is ready to obey those instructions. DNA and the cell fulfill these requirements. So do computer programs and computers. And so do memes and the human mind."

"My sense is that The Selfish Gene had a huge impact among evolutionary biologists, ecologists, and behaviourists, recruiting people to these fields and helping to get right the thinking of the less mathematically inclined. But in biomedicine, the largest and most well-funded area of biology, selfish genery has had negligible impact. This is in part because evolution is largely absent from biomedical training, and also because evolutionary biologists have been slow to leave the comfortable natural histories of birds and insects for the jargon-laden natural history of medicine. But it is also a consequence of the overwhelming dominance of a reductionism in (ironically a criticism once levelled at Dawkins). Explanation of disease virulence and infectiousness is usually sought in terms of molecular interactions, cell signalling, and so on. Mechanistic description is of course fantastically important and has yielded substantial insight and some clinical advances. However, such explanations are necessarily incomplete. To explain why something is like it is, we also need to ask about the evolutionary pressures. And this involves the thought processes laid out in The Selfish Gene."

"Dawkins’s carefully worded passage also explains why nature does not consist of one big bloody melee. For one thing, animals are less inclined to harm their close relatives, because any gene that would nudge an animal to harm a relative would have a good chance of harming a copy of itself sitting inside that relative, and natural selection would tend to weed it out. More important, Dawkins points out that another organism differs from a rock or a river because it is inclined to hit back. Any organism that has evolved to be violent is a member of a species whose other members, on average, have evolved to be just as violent. If you attack one of your own kind, your adversary may be as strong and pugnacious as you are, and armed with the same weapons and defenses. The likelihood that, in attacking a member of your own species, you will get hurt is a powerful selection pressure that disfavors indiscriminate pouncing or lashing out. It also rules out the hydraulic metaphor and most folk theories of violence, such as a thirst for blood, a death wish, a killer instinct, and other destructive itches, urges, and impulses. When a tendency toward violence evolves, it is always strategic. Organisms are selected to deploy violence only in circumstances where the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs. That discernment is especially true of intelligent species, whose large brains make them sensitive to the expected benefits and costs in a particular situation, rather than just to the odds averaged over evolutionary time."

"Why should organisms ever evolve to seek to harm other organisms? The answer is not as straightforward as the phrase “survival of the fittest” would suggest. In his book The Selfish Gene, which explained the modern synthesis of with genetics and game theory, Richard Dawkins tried to pull his readers out of their unreflective familiarity with the living world. He asked them to imagine animals as “survival machines” designed by their genes (the only entities that are faithfully propagated over the course of evolution), and then to consider how those survival machines would evolve. To a survival machine, another survival machine (which is not its own child or another close relative) is part of its environment, like a rock or a river or a lump of food. It is something that gets in the way, or something that can be exploited. It differs from a rock or a river in one important respect: it is inclined to hit back. This is because it too is a machine that holds its immortal genes in trust for the future, and it too will stop at nothing to preserve them. Natural selection favors genes that control their survival machines in such a way that they make the best use of their environment. This includes making the best use of other survival machines, both of the same and of different species. Anyone who has ever seen a hawk tear apart a starling, a swarm of biting insects torment a horse, or the AIDS virus slowly kill a man has firsthand acquaintance with the ways that survival machines callously exploit other survival machines. In much of the living world, violence is simply the default, something that needs no further explanation. When the victims are members of other species, we call the aggressors predators or parasites. But the victims can also be members of the same species. Infanticide, siblicide, cannibalism, rape, and lethal combat have been documented in many kinds of animals."

"Otter Leader: [Walks up to a painting of Dawkins and Garrison] The great Dawkins said we cannot tolerate those who don't use reason! How reasonable is it to eat off wood instead of your tummy? The Wise One: Well perhaps the great Dawkins wasn't so wise. Oh, he was intelligent, but, some of the most intelligent otters I've ever known were completely lacking in common sense."

"Richard Dawkins is arguably England's most pious atheist."

"Perhaps a suitable analogy to explain the short-falls of Dawkins's account of evolution is to think of an oil painting. In this analogy Dawkins has explained the nature and range of pigments; how the extraordinary azure colour was obtained, what effect cobalt has, and so on. But the description is quite unable to account for the picture itself. This view of evolution is incomplete and therefore fails in its side-stepping of how information (the genetic code) gives rise to phenotype, and by what mechanisms. Organisms are more than the sum of their parts, and we may also note in passing that the world depicted by Dawkins has lost all sense of transcendence."

"The God that Dawkins does not believe in is "a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." Come to think of it, I don't believe in a God like that either. In fact, I don't know anybody who does. Dawkins at least has the graciousness to appreciate this point. The God whom I know and love is described by Dawkins as “insipid,” summed up in the “mawkishly nauseating” idea of “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.” While some readers will take offense at this description, it is probably the mildest criticism of religion offered anywhere in his book""

"For someone who is a supposed rationalist, Dawkins refused to even acknowledge the basic difference between making the choice to break the law and being the victim of a crime. But only for rape, of course. It's unlikely Dawkins would think it's your fault if you are standing there minding your own business, while drunk, and someone hits you for no reason. But if the assault occurs with a penis instead of a fist, in Dawkins' mind, suddenly the victim is the person at fault."

"Anyone familiar with ‘selfish gene’ thinking will immediately spot the problem. The view that communication evolves for mutual benefit is essentially an argument based on the premise that natural selection works for the good of the group or species, rather than the good of the gene. It is especially remarkable that, in spite of this implicit underpinning assumption, many of the major proponents of the ‘information’ view of animal communication were avid, neo-Darwinian, individual selectionists. It took Richard’s relentless, uncompromising, and surgical application of neo-Darwinian thinking to expose the logic of animal communication with coruscating clarity."

"What Dawkins does too often is to concentrate his attack on fundamentalists. But there are many believers who are just not fundamentalists. Fundamentalism is another problem. I mean, Dawkins in a way is almost a fundamentalist himself, of another kind."

"Dawkins is a brilliant writer and speaker on science. His grasp of the subject and his use of vivid analogies can explain scientific concepts and make them clear even for the non-scientist..."

"To the best of my recollection, I have met Dawkins only once and by chance, when we coincided at some meeting in London. It must have been in late 2001, since conversation at dinner centered around the terrorist attacks of September 11. Most of those at the table were concerned with how the West would respond: would it retaliate, and if so how? Dawkins seemed uninterested. What exercised him was that Tony Blair had invited leaders of the main religions in Britain to Downing Street to discuss the situation—but somehow omitted to ask a leader of atheism (presumably Dawkins himself) to join the gathering. There seemed no question in Dawkins's mind that atheism as he understood it fell into the same category as the world's faiths. In this, Dawkins is surely right. To suppose that science can liberate humankind from ignorance requires considerable credulity. We know how science has been used in the past—not only to alleviate the human lot, but equally to serve tyranny and oppression. The notion that things might be fundamentally different in the future is an act of faith—one as gratuitous as any of the claims of religion, if not more so. Consider Pascal. One of the founders of modern probability theory and the designer of the world's first mass-transit system, he was far too intelligent to imagine that human reason could resolve perennial questions. His celebrated wager has always seemed to me a rather bad bet. Since we cannot know what gods there may be (if any), why stake our lives on pleasing one of them? But Pascal's wager was meant as a pedagogical device rather than a demonstrative argument, and he reached faith himself by way of skeptical doubt. In contrast, Dawkins shows not a trace of skepticism anywhere in his writings. In comparison with Pascal, a man of restless intellectual energy, Dawkins is a monument to unthinking certitude."

"Richard Dawkins is quite simply incomparable. No one can make science so exciting, so interesting, or so clear... If only Stephen Hawking had a tenth of his clarity."

"I think if we study the primates, we notice that a lot of these things that we value in ourselves, such as human morality, have a connection with primate behavior. This completely changes the perspective, if you start thinking that actually we tap into our biological resources to become moral beings. That gives a completely different view of ourselves than this nasty selfish-gene type view that has been promoted for the last 25 years."

"The question is whether there can be any progress of the mind in a secular world. That is to say, if we turn away from the ethical teachings of Christ, or for that matter Muhammad, what is left to guide us? What incentive do we have to be good if there is no afterlife? The problem that militant atheists confront, including recent popularisers of atheism like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, is that there isn’t really a very good answer to that."

"A psychologist colleague, on reading a draft of this essay, asked if The Selfish Gene is considered required reading in any philosophy graduate program. Certainly specialists in the philosophy of science or philosophy of biology would be expected to have read it, but what about students of epistemology or philosophy of mind or language? We philosophers are a somewhat conservative lot, loath to grant that anybody but a professional philosopher could write something worthy of entry into the canon. If you put The Selfish Gene on the required reading list, just which ‘classic’ would you bump from the list to make room for it? I have seen enough philosophy students enthusiastically tell me how they were transformed by reading the book to judge that it pulls its weight and then some, so yes, I put Dawkins’ book alongside classics by such non-philosophers as Turing and Kuhn as essential thinking tools for any student of philosophy. In addition to everything else they will learn from it, they will discover that it is actually possible to write arguments that are both rigorous and a joy to read. That discovery, if enough philosophers took it to heart, could transform our discipline."

"I haven't lived with the author of The Selfish Gene for nearly twenty-five years but I have lived in close and constant contact with the book itself since before it was published. Its words and figures of speech are thrown at me almost daily from student essays. The questions it raises are the driving force behind the most successful tutorials and the sound of pennies dropping as each new generation of students takes in the extraordinary implications of what the book is saying, is as loud now as it ever was. The Selfish Gene seems to occupy a unique place in biological writing. Some books, like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, herald a new age and have a huge impact on the way people think at the time but thereafter are read mainly for historical interest. Others form part of an ongoing movement but are soon superseded by more up-to-date versions or more fashionable means of expression. But if The Selfish Gene had not been written when it was, there would still be a need for it to be written today. There are simply no books that have taken its place, even now when so many other books have followed in its wake."

"We are now ready to survey afresh the battlefield of the sexes. With The Selfish Gene as our guide, we can compile a gene-centred inventory of any participants that we come across. There are the principal antagonists: ‘male’ and ‘female’ genes in conflict and the resulting multifarious adaptations in male and female creatures. There are the victors and victims that we would otherwise have missed: the agents of genomic imprinting, visiting the feuds of the previous generation upon the children. There are the subversive opportunists: mitochondria waging their own private war against nuclear genes over their mitochondrial mausoleum, the male parts of plants. And there are the innocent bystanders: victims of collateral damage from other’s battles, such as drowned and poisoned females. So the banner of the battle of the sexes should depict not a spider’s quietus in his lover’s jaws nor the withered anthers of a flower; for they represent other concerns of genes. Nor need it depict struggle or pain, injury or death. It could instead portray the dazzling beauty of the peacock’s tail, the deep intimacy of the titis’ embrace, the finely poised equilibrium that builds a newborn baby. Such are the ways of genes that even their conflicts—‘male’ against ‘female’ genes—can appear deceptively to us as harmony and beauty in their bearers."

"Dawkins is a master of setting up a straw man, then dismantling it with great relish. In fact, it is hard to escape the conclusion that such repeated mischaracterizations of faith betray a vitriolic personal agenda, rather than a reliance on rational arguments that Dawkins so cherishes in the scientific realm"

"All the biology that Dawkins tries to present as modern biology is no such thing... the idea of the selfish gene is an idea against biochemistry, against genetics which tells us that the DNA does not replicate itself, that it's not divided by itself, that it's divided by enzymes, that you have to take into account not only the genome; you also have to take into account the -ome, a whole system in which we can distinguish but not separate the different elements. That's why Dawkins has been so successful; science fiction is sold much better than scientific works."

"Supreme Court rules that a woman is legally defined as . . . a woman. Congratulations. And “The concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a man”. Yes, the science was settled in the Precambrian. Nice that the law has finally caught up."

"The buzz words of the campus—diversity, inclusion, microaggression, power differential, white privilege, group safety—have become the buzz words in public life. Already confusing on campus, they become noxious off campus."

"Science is not a social construct. Science’s truths were true before there were societies; will still be true after all philosophers are dead; were true before any philosophers were born; were true before there were any minds, even trilobite or dinosaur minds, to notice them."

"When I tweet on politics, even if I merely post a url, I get many replies like “Stick to science. Politics is not your field.” Which field, then, does qualify one to hold a political opinion? Are scientists specifically disqualified from thinking & caring about the world?"

"National pride has evil consequences. Prefer pride in humanity. German pride gave us Hitler, American pride gave us Trump, British pride gave us Brexit. If you must have pride, be proud that Homo sapiens could produce a Darwin, Shakespeare, Mandela, Einstein, Beethoven."

"Don't call him "clock boy" since he never made a clock. Hoax Boy, having hoaxed his way into the White House, now wants $15M in addition!"

"You know you've won the argument when the only counter argument they can find is that you are white or male or old."

"Islam needs a feminist revolution. It will be hard. What can we do to help?"

"University is about confronting new ideas, unfamiliar, un-"safe". If you want to be "safe" you are not worthy of a university education."

"Eugenics was not inspired by Darwin's natural selection but by ancient agricultural ARTIFICIAL selection. Eugenics is UNnatural selection."

"Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice."

"Mild paedophilia is bad. Violent paedophilia is worse. If you think that's an endorsement of mild paedophilia, go away and learn how to think. Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse. If you think that's an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think."

"Suggest always put Islamic "scholar" in quotes, to avoid insulting true scholars. True scholars have read more than one book."

"Who (apart from the pig) is damaged by bacon?"

"I've seen a dog & bitch indulging in full 69. Males of many species including Drosophila lick female genitals before copulation."

"If we ever talk to aliens, their civilisation will be far more advanced than ours (because of distances involved). They won't be religious!"

"Bin Laden has won, in airports of the world every day. I had a little jar of honey, now thrown away by rule-bound dundridges. STUPID waste."