Is Richard Dawkins a scientist?

So, rather than just opining on a breadboard, if you have any relevant skills perhaps you should try to help, or at least get involved in the "science mentoring programs" or be available for STEM (or STEAM).

It is not as a practicing scientist that Dawkins has produced his assaults against religion. As he makes clear in this memoir, he gave up active research in the 1970s when he left his crickets behind and began to write The Selfish Gene. Ever since, he has written as an ideologue of scientism, the positivistic creed according to which science is the only source of knowledge and the key to human liberation. He writes well—fluently, vividly, and at times with considerable power.

Dawkins knows practically nothing of the philosophy of science, still less about theology or the history of religion. From his point of view, he has no need to know. He can deduce everything he wants to say from first principles. Religion is a type of supernatural belief, which is irrational, and we will all be better off without it: for all its paraphernalia of evolution and memes, this is the sum total of Dawkins’s argument for atheism.

One might wager a decent sum of money that it has never occurred to Dawkins that to many people he appears as a comic figure. His default mode is one of rational indignation—a stance of withering patrician disdain for the untutored mind of a kind one might expect in a schoolmaster in a minor public school sometime in the 1930s. He seems to have no suspicion that any of those he despises could find his stilted pose of indignant rationality merely laughable.

He seems to have no suspicion that any of those he despises could find his stilted pose of indignant rationality merely laughable.

In his 2006 edition of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins merely cites some work of Hamilton, which is simply not good enough. Because he fails to admit that Hamilton has priority of both the phrase and its basic concept. And it is even worse for Dawkins to remain silent now because his weird failure to attribute priority to Hamilton has caused the pervasive myth that Dawkins coined the phrase 'selfish gene'. This means that literally millions of people are now being led to believe the myth that Dawkins is the originator of the most basic selfish gene concept, rather than his own developed notion of selfish genes being at the center of natural selection.

I learned from a colleague last week that one of the organizers from Nottingham Skeptics in the Pub - who read my blog on the Dawkins Selfish Gene Mythbust - went up to Dawkins at the QED conference in April two weeks ago and asked Dawkins directly whether or not he coined the phrase selfish gene. According to my colleague, the SITP guy was informed by Dawkins in no uncertain terms that he did coin the phrase. And then Dawkins stalked off. Funny that - because the elder Hamilton published it years before Dawkins did. Hamilton in fact coined that phrase selfish gene and originated the concept.

you mean "inclusive fitness"? Thats a Hamiltonian, but that wasnt your point was it?

Richard Dawkins, what on earth happened to you?

Remember when Dawkins was widely respected? When his biggest detractor was late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould? I don’t. Having grown up after Dawkins made the transition from lauded science communicator to old man who shouts at clouds, it’s hard for me to understand why anyone continues to listen to him about anything.

Sure, he wrote some pop science books back in the day, but why do we keep having him on TV and in the newspapers? All of his outbursts in recent years follow from this belief: he understands the scientific method, a process intended to mitigate the interference of human subjectivity in data collection, as a universally applicable way of understanding not just the physical world but literally everything else as well. Hence his constant complaint that those appalled by his bigoted vituperations are simply offended by clarity; feeble-minded obscurantists who cling to emotion, tradition or the supernatural to shield themselves from the power of his truth bombs.

Dawkins’ narrowmindedness, his unshakeable belief that the entire history of human intellectual achievement was just a prelude to the codification of scientific inquiry, leads him to dismiss the insights offered not only by theology, but philosophy, history and art as well.

This is Dawkins in 2014: a figure of mockery, a man so convinced that he possesses God-like powers of omniscience that he can’t understand why everyone’s getting angry at him for pointing out the obvious. Why won’t we all just learn how to think, damn it!

If he can’t see it, then it doesn’t exist, and anyone trying to describe it to him is delusional and possibly dangerous. All we can do at this point is hope his decline into hysterical dogmatism culminates in a reverse deathbed conversion.

But if there’s one thing Dawkins has tried to impress upon us, it’s that miracles don’t exist. So I’ll do him the courtesy of not holding my breath.

Richard Dawkins has lost it

I became an atheist on my own, but it was Richard Dawkins who strengthened and confirmed my decision. For a long time, I admired his insightful science writing, his fierce polemics, his uncompromising passion for the truth. When something I’d written got a (brief) mention in The God Delusion, it was one of the high points of my life.

So, I’m not saying this is easy, but I have to say it: Richard Dawkins, I’m just not that into you anymore....There’s no denying that Dawkins played a formative role in the atheist movement, but it’s grown beyond just him. Remarks like these make him a liability at best, a punchline at worst. He may have convinced himself that he’s the Most Rational Man Alive, but if his goal is to persuade everyone else that atheism is a welcoming and attractive option, Richard Dawkins is doing a terrible job.

As both an atheist and a scientist, he should be the first to defend the principle that no one is above criticism, and that any idea can be challenged, especially an idea in accord with popular prejudices. Instead, with no discernible sense of irony, Dawkins is publicly recycling the bad arguments so often used against him as an atheist: accusing his critics of being “outrage junkies” who are only picking fights for the sake of notoriety; roaring about “thought police” as though it were a bad thing to argue that someone is mistaken and attempt to change their mind; scoffing that they’re “looking for excuses to be angry” as though the tone of the argument, rather than its factual merits, were the most important thing; encouraging those who are targets of criticism to ignore it rather than respond.

Richard Dawkins has succumbed to the delusion that he’s infallible on any topic he chooses to address, and in so doing, has wandered off the edge and plummeted into belligerent crankery. Whatever he may say, it’s up to the wider atheist community to make it clear that this one public intellectual doesn’t speak for all of us.

Dawkins’s very public hostility...is harming the cause he himself claims to care about. In the long run, however, the reputation Dawkins will damage the most is his own.

Im never sure about the makeup of the teabag, unlike the IDers