Tags for this video have been changed from 'richard dawkins greatest show on earth interview sky news science evolution' to 'richard dawkins, greatest show on earth, interview, sky news, science, evolution' - edited by gwiz665

As an English Atheist, I often find it excruciating to listen to Richard Dawkins - he's usually the angry, petulant teenage voice of Atheism - but this didn't annoy me as much as usual. Yet I still see him as an intolerant and embarrassing figurehead for Darwinism and Evolution, and hold him in the same light as those abuse and twist religious dogma for their own hateful ends.

Oh, and Sky News sucks.

He never annoys me. He just seems slightly frustrated with all the religious nuts. I have great sympathy for his frustration.

Love the title of his new book.

he's usually the angry, petulant teenage voice of Atheism

I hate to go all Dawkinsy on you here, but where exactly is the evidence for that? I always hear people left and right going "Dawkins is shrill" "Dawkins is angry" etc, usually followed by "well maybe not in this video/book/qoute then, but usually he is.." Well, WHERE? WHEN was Dawkins "angry,petulant, shrill, simplistic, childish, or whatever?

This character seems to me to be entirely fictional, a strawman Dawkins (Strawkins?) invented by his opponents, who always seem to know what Dawkins has said and what he stands for without hearing a single word he's ever actually said or written . If you actually listen to Dawkins himself, and not "Strawkins", I think you'll get an entirely different opinion about him.

Heh Strawkins, that made me chuckle.

Have any of his ideas actually been accepted by the modern evolutionary synthesis? I know, for example, that his work on memetics is largely considered pseudoscience. And isn't he a zoologist?

I agree more-or-less with the common sense/logic based arguments against the existence of God, but I hate seeing him cast in such a glorious light, as if he's some super-scientist. He seems more like a storyteller, but a good one. Sells lots of books. You want a real scientist to look up to? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson

I've heard him make some snarky comments (I think?) but I imagine it's probably due to people constantly asking him the same questions on religion, morality, the meaning of life, etc. But in most clips and interviews I've seen he remains pretty calm, direct and well spoken.

>> ^EndAll:
Have any of his ideas actually been accepted by the modern evolutionary synthesis? I know, for example, that his work on memetics is largely considered pseudoscience.


Dawkins is widely regarded as a thinker and explainer, While his ideas aren't groundbreaking in themselves, he is among the finest to express them clearly, not only for the general public, but also fellow biologists. in this sense he has much more in common with Huxley than Darwin. Memetics is a field/subject brilliantly coined by Dawkins in the last chapter of The Selfish Gene, but Dawkins himself seems not to spend much time exploring the concept. His purpose of introducing it, seems to have been to suggest that natural selection, or Darwinism, did not have to be constrained to traditional biology (genes), but could apply to any mechanism capable of copying information with modification. Memetics is not regarded as pseudoscience nor science, it is an abstract concept meant to illustrate a point. It is pretty self evident that some ideas are better at surviving than others, and it is also pretty clear that this doesnt have to correlate with the idea's truth value. I could easily make up two sentences now that are clearly false, or atleast complete and utter nonsense that almost definately is false, yet I can make a good guess on which one gets passed on:
1. "All elephants will turn into pink bats with feathers by the end of 2009"
2. "Unless you pass this sentence on, your mother will most likely die within the hour"
If you honestly, truthffully cannot see which sentence I am guessing, and if you do a test with comptelely ambiguous results, then yes, maybe memetics has nothing to it. or maybe there is another explanation at work, btu i think its pretty clear that there is lots of evidence that memetics works, and little to suggest that it doesnt. Modern genetics, for instance, is actually increasingly SIMILAR to memetics, because our DNA is actually just genetic information. "Pseudoscience" is a word we reserve for bogus nonsense lik "homeopathy" and "faithhealing", not memetics.

I think Dawkins' comb evolved into something else.

*dead

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