You still haven’t provided any evidence that Dawkins is a ‘brilliant academic’ who as ‘dealt with philosophy for many years’ in any capacity which justifies your claim that he should be taken seriously on the subject.
Why? Jeremy Pierce (teaches philosophy at Le Moyne College and Syracuse University), says this.
If you think that’s an overstatement, please provide an evidence based reason for doing so.
I did question it; I invited you to prove it and you haven’t. I provided several points of information which you could have used, but didn’t.
I didn’t assume it a priori, I drew my conclusion on the basis of the fact that you provided no evidence for your claim, and the fact that informed professional say otherwise. If you really think that was a personal attack then report it, as I’ve said.
Really? Then report it.
:roflmao: See [url=The 'religion sucks' thread [lightning rod] and [url=The Easter/resurrection rumble thread [warning: this is a free for all] I permit every form of ridicule, abuse, and criticism of Christianity on this forum.
Please read what I actually wrote. I said that the best way to identify the extent to which Dawkins has actually ‘read’ and ‘studied’ on the subject, is to compare his writings on the subject to those of qualified professionals, and to examine what qualified professionals say about his comments on these subjects. That way we’re not guessing, and we’re subjecting his comments to objective scrutiny. The ‘objective scrutiny’ in this case is not my personal scrutiny, but the scrutiny of third party qualified professionals.
No, I’m saying that if a biologist writes on philosophy and religion, and qualified professionals in philosophy and religion say that his writings demonstrate that he knows next to nothing about the subject, then the rational conclusion is that he knows next to nothing about the subject.
Of course I was exaggerating. This isn’t an ‘admission’, no one would seriously imagine that Dawkins’ knowledge of philosophy could literally be written on the back of a torn postage stamp, on which you could fit perhaps three words. I mean ‘an extremely poor understanding of philosophy, certainly insufficient to be treated as authoritative on the subject, and certainly insufficient to be making the kind of dogmatic claims he’s making’. You know, what I actually wrote.
No I am not. I am asserting that if a biologist writes on philosophy and religion, and qualified professionals in philosophy and religion say that his writings demonstrate that he knows next to nothing about the subject, then the rational conclusion is that he knows next to nothing about the subject. Just as when Dawkins says that Nigel McQuoid knows next to nothing about evolution on the basis of a couple of statements by McQuoid; ‘The level of McQuoid’s scientific understanding can be judged from his belief that the world is less than ten thousand years old, and also from the following quotation’, ‘The use of the phrase in such a context is illiterate nonsense’, ‘science is not Mr McQuoid’s subject’. Would you tell Dawkins that he is judging McQuoid unfairly, that Dawkins is ‘asserting that a flawed interpretation is the same as a virtually non-existent understanding’?
Please just read what I write instead of asking if I am saying X, Y, or Z when I never wrote X, Y, or Z. I am saying that just because someone writes a lot of words about a topic, doesn’t mean that they have an overall knowledge of the topic. You know, what I actually wrote.
Yes I understand that. What you don’t seem to realize yet is that when qualified professionals say that Dawkins’ knows next to nothing about a subject, that’s good evidence that he knows next to nothing about the subject.
My original objection was to your unqualified claim that Dawkins is ‘brilliant’. You’ve now changed that to ‘brilliant biologist’, another claim made without presenting any evidence; so let’s see your evidence for that claim please. What do you mean by ‘brilliant biologist’, and who recognizes him as a ‘brilliant biologist’?
In a 40 year career, he has published on average less than one academic paper per year; of these papers, only eight (out of 35), appear in the highest ranking journals (‘Nature’, ‘Science’, and the ‘Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B, Biological Sciences’). This is far from the typical output of a well performing (let alone ‘brilliant’), academic. He is not found at all in ISI Highy Cited (check for yourself). His books are all popular works, none of them academic publications except for ‘The Oxford Book of Modern Science writing’ in 2008. However, even in this case he only served as editor; he did not contribute any articles.
He has made only two attempts at original contribution to the discipline of evolutionary studies; an evolutionary explanation for religion, and a theory of memes (memetics). Both have been widely criticized by his scientific peers, even ridiculed. His evolutionary explanation for religion has come under sustained attack by other evolutionary scientists, who have objected to his lack of original work on the subject,[1] ‘fundamentalist rhetoric’ devoid of scientific evidence,[2] failure to address the current professional literature,[3] [4] factual inaccuracy,[5] and personal ranting.[6]
His theory of memes was promoted (by Dawkins himself), as a brand new insight into evolutionary theory and its application to cultural and society. In reality it was not new; it was first proposed in 1904,[7] revisited by anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn in the 1940s, and examined in detail by Gerard, Kluchohn, and Rapoport in the 1950s (‘Biological and Cultural Evolution: Some Analogies and Explorations’, 1956). It had already been abandoned by the time Dawkins started writing about it. Dawkins has acknowledged he was not aware of the previous work on the subject when he started writing, which shows how ‘well read’ he was on this subject.
Dawkins’ meme theory has been criticized profoundly by professional philosophers such as David Stove[8] and Michael Ruse (a staunch opponent of Creationism and ‘Intelligent Design’, and one of the prosecution witnesses in McLean v. Arkansas).[9]
As if this was not enough, memetics has been rejected overwhelmingly by the scientific community also. In 2005 the ‘Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission’, established specifically to examine and develop the discipline of memetics, was abandoned ‘due to a lack of quality submissions’.[10] The theory had failed the test of academic scrutiny and professional peer review;[11] [12] it was ‘a short-lived fad whose effect has been to obscure more than it has been to enlighten’.[13] Last year one of the previously foremost upholders of Dawkins’ application of memetics to religion, renounced the view and her own writings on the subject.[14] Attempts to revive the theory have been resisted in the professional literature.[15] A recurring criticism is that Dawkins never did the real scientific work necessary to establish the facts before proposing his theory.[16]
I am certain he is well read in biology (though he has been criticized by some of his scientific peers for ignoring key literature), but as other professionals have pointed out, he is not well read on other subjects on which he writes, specifically philosophy and religion. I’m afraid that listing a lot of books in an index or bibliography is no guarantee of being well read. It is certainly no guarantee that the author of the list has even read all of the works they cite. I refer you again to people like Ken Ham, who can put up a nice long list of books in a bibliography, and still fail to demonstrate any knowledge of the subject on which they write. If I wrote a long list of books on biology, would you consider me well read in biology?
What matters is the quality of the works cited, evidence that the writer has read and understood them, and evidence that the author has actually engaged in an informed manner with the relevant scholarly literature. An actual case of Dawkins using Google instead of proper research, is a quotation he provides from Luther on page 221, which he clearly took from a website because he actually provides the URL. Dawkins uses it in an attempt to prove that Luther ridiculed reason and believed that reason was incompatible with religion. Dawkins does not tell us the context of the quotation (most likely because he does not know, having scraped the quotation secondhand from a website he found), nor does he bother to tell us what Luther actually wrote on the relationship of reason and religion, which was this.
My source is Bervgall, ‘Reason in Luther, Calvin, and Sidney’, The Sixteenth Century Journal (23.1.115-127), Spring 1992 (which examines Luther’s actual attitude to reason), and the same text can be found in many academic sources. Of course Dawkins did not tell his readers about this quotation, most likely because he has no idea that it even exists. The fact that Dawkins makes such blunders as casually referring to the New Testament book of Hebrews as written by Paul is a case in point. The book itself is anonymous, and critical scholarship has agreed for over 100 years that it could not have been written by Paul; even Sunday School students know this stuff, and so do people who are actually ‘well read’ on the subject of the Bible. This is a typical example of Dawkins simply not knowing what he’s talking about.
Of course not.
I have little formal training in epistemology (only a year and a half in philosophy), but that’s ok because I don’t make authoritative statements on epistemology on the basis of my own understanding. In fact I always avoid making personal assertions on subjects concerning which I am inadequately qualified; I refer instead to the relevant scholarly literature.
[1] 'When Dawkins’ The God Delusion was published I naturally assumed that he was basing his critique of religion on the scientific study of religion from an evolutionary perspective. I regret to report otherwise. He has not done any original work on the subject and he has not fairly represented the work of his colleagues. ', Wilson, ‘Beyond Demonic Memes: Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong About Religion’, eSkeptic, Wednesday July 4 (2007).
[2] ‘Here is how Dawkins recounts the period in his 1982 book The Extended Phenotype: "The intervening years since Darwin have seen an astonishing retreat from his individual-centered stand, a lapse into sloppily unconscious group-selectionism … We painfully struggled back, harassed by sniping from a Jesuitically sophisticated and dedicated neo-group-selectionist rearguard, until we finally regained Darwin’s ground, the position that I am characterizing by the label ‘the selfish organism…” This passage has all the earmarks of fundamentalist rhetoric, including appropriating the deity (Darwin) for one’s own cause.’, Wilson, ‘Beyond Demonic Memes: Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong About Religion’, eSkeptic, Wednesday July 4 (2007).
[3] ‘Only more scientific legwork can resolve these issues, but one thing is sure: Dawkins’ armchair speculation about the guilt-inducing effects of religion doesn’t even get him to first base.’, Wilson, ‘Beyond Demonic Memes: Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong About Religion’, eSkeptic, Wednesday July 4 (2007).
[4] ‘As a second example reported in the December 8, 2006 issue of Science, economist Samuel Bowles estimated that between-group selection was strong enough to promote the genetic evolution of altruism in our own species, exactly as envisioned by Darwin. These and many other examples, summarized by Edward O. Wilson and myself in a forthcoming review article, are ignored entirely by Dawkins, who continues to recite his mantra that the selective disadvantage of altruism within groups poses an insuperable problem for between-group selection.’, Wilson, ‘Beyond Demonic Memes: Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong About Religion’, eSkeptic, Wednesday July 4 (2007).
[5] ‘The problem with Dawkins’ analysis, however, is that if he doesn’t get the facts about religion right, his diagnosis of the problems and proffered solutions won’t be right either.’, Wilson, ‘Beyond Demonic Memes: Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong About Religion’, eSkeptic, Wednesday July 4 (2007).
[6] ‘Time will tell where Dawkins sits on the bell curve of open-mindedness concerning group selection in general and religion in particular. At the moment, he is just another angry atheist, trading on his reputation as an evolutionist and spokesperson for science to vent his personal opinions about religion.’, Wilson, ‘Beyond Demonic Memes: Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong About Religion’, eSkeptic, Wednesday July 4 (2007).
[7] ‘The overall concept was not totally new or altogether Dawkins’ invention. According to Wikipedia, the German Richard Semon had a work published in 1904 titled “Die Mnemischen Empfindungen in ihren Beziehungen zu den Originalempfindungen”, meaning loosely, “The Memory-Based Feelings In Their Relation To The Original Feelings (or Sensations)”, wherein he had invented the term mneme. The word came into English with the translation in 1921 of Semon’s book, “The Mneme”.That term was picked up and used by Maurice Maeterlinck in a book, “The Life of the White Ant”, which came out in 1926. Dawkins has stated he did not know of that earlier term, the mneme, or its usage.', Gurdur, ‘[ur=http://heathen-hub.com/blog.php?b=574]Whatever happened to memes and memetics? Richard Dawkin’s idea, and how it became a zombie idea: Part 1[/url]’ September 19 (2010).
[8] ‘I try to think of what I, or anyone, could say to him, to help restrain him from going over the edge into absolute madness. But if a man believes that, when he was first taught Pythagoras’ Theorem at school, his brain was parasitized by a certain micro-maggot which, 2600 years earlier had parasitized the brain of Pythagoras, …what can one say to him, with any hope of effect? And if a man already believes that genes are selfish, why indeed should ne not also believe that prime numbers are sex mad, or that geometrical theorems are brain parasites?', Stove & Kimball, ‘Against the Idols of the Age’, p. 278 (2001); ellipsis in original text.
[9] ‘One is really just taking regular language and putting it in fancy terms. No new insights. No new predictions. No astounding claims that turn out to be true. More importantly, one is not really using Darwinian evolutionary theory to do any work.’, Ruse, ‘Charles Darwin’, p. 281 (2008).
[10] Edmonds, ‘The revealed poverty of the gene-meme analogy – why memetics per se has failed to produce substantive results’, Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission (9), 2005.
[11] ‘I claim that the underlying reason memetics has failed is that it has not provided any extra explanatory or predictive power beyond that available without the gene-meme analogy. Thus whilst the idea of memes has retained its attractiveness for some in terms of a framework for thinking about phenomena, it has not provided any “added value” it terms of providing new understanding of phenomena’, Edmonds, ‘The revealed poverty of the gene-meme analogy – why memetics per se has failed to produce substantive results’, Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission (9), 2005.
[12] ‘Back ten years ago, there was still serious scientific research into memes. These days, practically nothing. It’s proved itself futile, a blind alley, a non-productive theory that never really got off the ground despite quite intensive work by many. Today in almost all cases the word “meme” is merely a metaphor, or it is used in a pseudo-scientific way. It is a zombie, dead on its feet but still lurching around. Memetics, as in the original idea of a science of memes, is a zombie idea.’, Gurdur, ‘[ur=http://heathen-hub.com/blog.php?b=574]Whatever happened to memes and memetics? Richard Dawkin’s idea, and how it became a zombie idea: Part 1[/url]’ September 19 (2010); see also his followup article here.
[13] ‘The fact is that the closer work has been to the core of memetics, the less successful it has been. The central core, the meme-gene analogy, has not been a wellspring of models and studies which have provided “explanatory leverage” upon observed phenomena. Rather, it has been a short-lived fad whose effect has been to obscure more than it has been to enlighten. I am afraid that memetics, as an identifiable discipline, will not be widely missed.’, Edmonds, ‘The revealed poverty of the gene-meme analogy – why memetics per se has failed to produce substantive results’, Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission (9), 2005.
[14] ‘So it seems I was wrong and the idea of religions as “viruses of the mind” may have had its day.’, Blackmore, ‘Why I no longer believe religion is a virus of the mind’, The Guardian, September 16 (2010).
[15] ‘Distin’s defense of `memetics’ is deficient because it is based on a flawed analogy with genetics.', Walter, ‘Biology and social life: book review/Biologie et vie sociale: note de lecture: The trouble with memes: deconstructing Dawkins’s monster. An Essay Review of The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reappraisal by Kate Distin and Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd’, Social Science Information (46.4.691-709), December 2007.
[16] ‘As with religion, Dawkins has not conducted empirical research on cultural evolution, preferring to play the role of Mycroft Holmes, who sat in his armchair and let his younger brother Sherlock do the legwork.’, Wilson, ‘Beyond Demonic Memes: Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong About Religion’, eSkeptic, Wednesday July 4 (2007).