Comments on: Life In The Fast Lane

By: Malcolm

Malcolm — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:21:38 +0000

Spot on, Bob.

By: bob koepp

bob koepp — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:16:48 +0000

I usually try to focus on issues rather than personalities, but sometimes it’s just beyond me. Dawkins was a superb popularizer of evolutionary theory. When he has ventured outside his own area of expertise, however, he hasn’t been superbly anything. Makes the amateur psychologist in me wonder if his nastiness is a form of defensiveness — bluster behind which lurks intellectual insecurity… Regardless, I wish he’d stick to what he’s really, really good at.

By: Malcolm

Malcolm — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:14:39 +0000

Hi Addofio,

I think the central ideas — that genes are stable enough entitites to be trackable over geological time, and that selection can be seen as operating at the gene level — are still valid enough.

I do admire Dawkins; The Selfish Gene was an important piece of work, and he has written many fine books (in particular, I thought The Ancestor’s Tale was outstanding). He has also been a strong voice for the secular, Darwinian viewpoint. But he often comes across as rather narrow-mindedly bullying and vindictive, and he needn’t be. I don’t admire him for that at all.

By: Addofio

Addofio — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 15:47:58 +0000

What struck me, without reading further in the transcript, was what Dawkins chose to attack. He made his first big splash with his “Selfish Gene” thesis, the scientific fate of which, if you will, lives or dies on the identity of genes. That is, on genes being entities with independent identities. I read the book more than 30 years ago, so my recollection is a bit hazy, but I know that some of what he built his “Selfish Gene” thesis on has since been disproved (the existence of vast quantities of “junk” DNA. The DNA in question has since been found to have important regulatory roles.) And now he chooses to attack an idea from before we knew anything about DNA, an idea diametrically opposed to his own most important scientific work. Hmm.

(As you might infer, I haven’t the admiration for Dawkins that you do.)

By: Malcolm

Malcolm — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 05:33:40 +0000

Bob, I quite agree. Dawkins has done important creative work — and I admire him a great deal for it, and for his many excellent books — but he does seem to exhibit considerable intellectual and rhetorical narcissism. One thing I was struck by in this video is how much more intellectually virile the younger Venter seemed in this chat.

By: bob koepp

bob koepp — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 01:15:02 +0000

Malcolm – As usual, my problem with Dawkins is his inability to resist the temptation to read others in an uncharitable way, apparently so he can assume an air of intellectual superiority. To wit, his talk of the “comprehensive destruction of a conventional view,” which, on closer reading is, rather, a description of the “state of theory” around 1930. And guess what… At the time Singer wrote that passage it was a pretty accurate assessment of the theory of the gene. The most advanced accounts of genes at the time portrayed them as “factors” defined in terms of their effects, residing “somewhere” on/in chromosomes. And, on the basis of associated or disassociated patterns of inheritance, their relative “distances” could be estimated. That ain’t a mechanist theory by any stretch.