World's foremost atheist televangelist to attack children's literature!

There is a new forward in The Selfish Gene that explains the controversy about his use of the term. Mary Midgley's misunderstanding is exactly what this was intended to avoid.

 

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It wasn't a misunderstanding. She's been proved right. Ask any lay person what they think the Selfish Gene is about.

 

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She is a philosopher. Proved right is not applicable to her criticism or her field. Dawkins wasn't talking about psychological egoism.

 

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As a philosopher, her job is to avoid conceptual confusions; since she has been proved right, it hardly matters what Dawkins was or was not talking about.

http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/articles/article.php?id=15

 

What's the Selfish Gene about, Sam?

 

Perhaps Dawkins has really only demonstrated how culture and mythology can work in ways an author doesn't intend them to (how strange), that using words from a language which is itself a cultural product is also a 'selfish' act. He doesn't seem to acknowledge that any use of language must necessarily entail a use of cultural 'norms' and known or understood mythologies.

James R appears to have concluded that reason and scientific inquiry have managed to debunk thousands of years of human culture and mythology (religious belief, creation myths, etc).

I conclude that instead of debunking either, academic inquiry has only led to a 'different' mythology and culture, i.e. the enlightenment of scientific rationality is in fact a substitute mythology, for the religious 'enlightenment' it claims to displace.

In short, mythologies are a requirement for culture; culture is a requirement for coherent social order. Rationality and logic are also mythologies, albeit 'correct' ones. Dawkins sails straight past this 'little problem'.

Not that his individual effort to shed light on the evolutionary problem of 'intelligence', isn't interesting or thought-provoking in itself, but that any such inquiry should at least be honest about what it is, and 'tie down' any exotic species such as 'selfishness', and ' meaningful idea', for example, rather than dangle them like strange jewels.

If it's just informational, then information is not meant to 'mean' anything, for instance, so how to convey, or avoid conveying, the 'wanted/unwanted meaning'? None of this is really investigated - he should at least not assume, or explain better how, he isn't using culturally biased terminology, I mean most of his critics accuse him of this crime.

 

Her job seems to be creating elaborate strawman arguments to justify her navel gazing career. Dawkins does elaborate on the fact that humans have culture, and individual experience, and can act in any number of absurd, irrational, or non-self interested ways.

 

She's a philosopher, her job is to convey concepts accurately to the people/

If you're writing a textbook, thats not her purview, but if a philosopher thinks your book will not be conveying the correct concepts to lay people, thats pretty much what it is.

 

Which is all completely irrelevant to genetics and evolution.

 

I quoted her declarative, English, compete sentence, badly mistaken assertion.

Then I pointed out that she is obviously and simply mistaken about what Dawkins argues.

What point of hers did I miss?

The rant of hers that you quoted is not even close to "right". It asserts that Dawkins is saying things quite contrary to what Dawkins is saying in his book "the Selfish Gene". It is badly wrong about Dawkins's book, in a very simpleminded way despite its florid vocabulary, and notably intemperate in its expression of what amounts to an embarrassing error for a professional intellectual.

She should restrict her efforts to concepts she understands herself.

If she claims to be talking about Dawkins's ideas, most people would tend to think it matters what those ideas are.

If she's just making shit up, she should invent an author and book while she's at it.

I'm a lay person. Ask me. Midgeley is the alleged philosopher here. She's a crackpot, as far as your quote of her reveals - completely confused, out to lunch, and vituperatively arrogant about what are fairly obvious mistakes.

Take a look at this quote again:

That is goofy. If there is anything in biology less central to "The Selfish Gene" than the emotional nature of man, I can't think of what it is offhand. If there is a single theme in that book more important than that nothing of the nature of any biological organism can be assumed to be explicable as "self-interest", but instead that all organisms are significantly creations of genes in the genes' behalf, what would it be?

Are you sure she has actually read that book?

 

Any concepts. The job of philosophy is to clarify how concepts are used.

 

That she's right. 20 years on, Dawkins is still explaining basic evolutionary concepts to his audience.

We're talking about a book purportedly claiming to bring evolution to the people.

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You tell me.

 

So, philosophers are the arbiters of all correct concepts? And, we are to pay attention to philosophers, who have no training or education in biology, when they explain biological concepts?

Yeah, that makes sense. :bugeye:

 

Midgley goes on and on about "fatalism" and "determinism" -all human social constructs used in human philosophy. She seems concerned with the human emotion and offended that Dawkins is willing to look at the world, particularly human existence, scientifically -willing to reduce life to matter and molecules to explain the whys and hows.

Clearly she's misunderstood what Dawkins' main point of The Selfish Gene is, which is to explain all life not just human life and existence. Midgley comes across as some sort of post-modernist bigot that sees something "special" in the existence of man over that of the rest of "creation."

To summarize, she has a discontent with Dawkins shared with S.A.M. and is a convenient person to quote, allowing SAM to say, "see, the rest of the scientific community dislikes Dawkins."

The reality is, Midgley is a single post-modernist with an ax to grind and a borderline crackpot.

 

She's been proved right. Some crackpot.

 

SAM, you can quote all the critics you want. Why don't you simply open The Selfish Gene, read it and offer your own criticisms? Its very accessible and very readable, even for a lay-person such as yourself.

 

Where was she "proved" right again?