Turns out, he's an Aries. I think we're compatible.

I'm an Aries too, wanna get together some time?

Yeah, this redeems him a lot in my eyes, although he still bears some responsibility for all of the pseudoscientific nonsense spouted in the name of Evolutionary Psychology.

Well it turns out some people are so insecure about religion being taken seriously, that they'll look for opportunities to undermine and belittle those doing the questioning regardless of whether it relates at all to what is being said.

And I'm not referring to those scientists if that's at all unclear. Because the first link isn't what you claimed, it's a respectful departure, and the second is just Dawkins and a scientist disagreeing on the role of kin selection.

That's what science looks like.

What an absurd statement to make. Those people aren't suggesting that he's not a competent biologist, they're just disagreeing with him on the details, which is a pretty big part of the job and is absolutely essential if science is to get us anywhere.

Some people like prang below have suggested that he's a jerk but nobody is really saying they don't take him seriously as a biologist. Except for people that don't respect biology as a whole.

Also the proper response to people saying they believe in God is the same response I had that one time that guy I was kind of dating mentioned that he knew a parent that was molesting his children but it was okay because the kids initiated it.

Are you two just not familiar with baleen or something?

"Those people aren't suggesting that he's not a competent biologist." Actually, Wilson has asked that Dawkins "step down" from being the public face of evolutionary science (he's not the only one). That's a pretty serious thing to say and tantamount to him not being taken seriously.

Selfish Gene theory no longer runs the show. Of course it's not dead in the water, but it's not the only game in town either. While plenty of scientists will publicly approve of Dawkins, behind the scenes and in the trenches of evolutionary science there's a very different thing going on.

A close family friend of ours is a leading geneticist at DuPont and a fellow at an Ivy League college and all that. As such he gets to attend all the lectures and conventions around the world on all subjects genome and evolution. He is very quick to point out that Dawkins is something of a joke among the majority of researchers, but when Dawkins is confronted he tends to have an emotional meltdown. He is an unfortunate example of politics and prestige replacing actual relevance.

Big names like Wilson, Gould and Noble think Selfish Gene is a load a crock, and that's dangerous.

See this site that revolves around the "debate" between ID and evolution:

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/04/worlds_leading_071641.htm l

Oh no! Science has something wrong, therefore... Intelligent Design! That evolutionary biologists have been trumpeting the likes of Dawkins for decades has everybody rightfully terrified of what is going to happen when the smoke clears.

IrishWhisky, I think you have the problem pegged in your first paragraph. The idea that traditional ideas of evolution on the genetic level might be coming undone is pretty scary. Evolutionary biologists are rightfully terrified of what religious people will do when they get a hold of how weird things actually are. You need only look at the horrible faith-driven drivel in response to the God Delusion to be swayed to believe that, even if Dawkins wasn't really right, maybe it's better off that we believe that he is.

Umm...there is such a thing as racism against white people. and there is such a thing as sexism against men. It certainly isn't on the scale of racism and sexism as it's generally stated but it does exist. and no it also doesn't interfere with the day to day life of a white man but that doesn't mean people aren't sexist and racist against white men.

Oh

I get seriously annoyed with the whole "white males have no problems" trope. Not because being a white male is so horrible, but because the naked, smug hypocrisy of making a sexist, racist assumption under the pretense of fighting sexism and racism is so impossibly douchey on so many levels that it paradoxically reinforces the postcolonial paternalism these people supposedly despise so much.

@prang: I can't tell if you're mocking me or being serious.

@sexyduck: I don't think it reinforces anything other than ignorance it I just think it makes you an asshole if you say it doesn't exist. but then on the flip side you have MRA's and white pride fuckers (not saying an MRA is anyway comparison to white pride assholes) who refuse to see that the sexism and racism they feel is in any way comparable to that of black people and women. like fuck those people.

Eh, there's nothing particularly insightful about saying that it's possible for white people to be the targets of racism or for men to be the targets of sexism. This ground has been covered a billion times already and this is not the place to do it really. To get all pedantic about the dictionary definitions of racism and sexism is to divert the discussion pretty hard away from the point I think people want to make to him—albeit with varying degrees of clarity—that his comments about Islam are being made in a profoundly Islamophobic culture in which racism plays a major part, that his comments about women are being made in a culture in which women are violently assaulted by men etc. I dunno, I think those are legit beefs to have with a public figure and intellectual.

I dunno why he's so up in arms about being called an insufferable smug white male making snide comments in loafers, that's a pretty apt description of Richard Dawkins if you ask me.

He still does. The Greatest Show on Earth was a very good book explaining evolution, and he wrote a kids book on skepticism last year.

With that said, we don't accept the idea that people who challenge bad political systems or beliefs are wasting their time by not doing science, nor is that any different when challenging religion. It's just that people who don't like what he says will defend two priests arguing over what God says as "exploring spirituality", while questioning whether he's speaking is a 'waste of time'.

If trying to combat creationism, it's more important to challenge religious entitlement than explain the science, because the people who reject it generally aren't doing so because it hasn't been explained, but because society and their culture tells them to. And even if one disagrees, it doesn't mean we shouldn't try doing both.

"If you want a wonderful, brain melting adventure, read his books on biology"

I don't know, meme. I've never really forgiven him for his attacks on punctuated equilibrium.

Mean ol' jerk.

He's in no way the same type, size, or magnitude of asshole until he gets millions of tax-free monuments to fairy tales erected in every town for the duped to gather in followed by the attempt to codify tenets based on bronze-age mythology from the Middle East into law, especially those that repress segments of society based on gender, race, etc.

One time a woman asked people politely to not aggressively corner her and hit on her and he got so angry that he wrote a letter to an imaginary Muslim woman apologizing for the problems with sexist bigotry in the middle east that remain unsolved, presumably because one specific woman decided to set boundaries rather than eliminate Islam from the middle east.

It's called the Comparative Justice fallacy and in my opinion it's the dumbest of the lot. Notice how the issue at hand wasn't really any of Dawkins' fucking business and he put way more effort into his letter trying to shame her for her request. He's making bullshit complaints about her legitimate complaints, and he didn't even have the decency to fix all the misogyny in the middle east before doing so.

You know what's an even worse fallacy than the Comparative Justice one? Leaving out all relevant details of a situation so as to suggest that Dawkins wrote an angry letter about Islam because a woman 'asked people politely not to hit on her'.

That's not even a fallacy, that's just lying by omission.

He is a pretty cool guy that suffers from a curse many other gifted types suffer from. From his authoritative viewpoint he can't understand why anyone would believe what he considers to be obviously wrong shit about evolution and religion.

Only he doesn't take their relative ignorance (willful or not) into account when they spout their bullshit. Consequently he suffers daily aneurisms.