Dawkins: Richard

Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker. W.W. Norton Company, New York. 1986. 

Dawkins, Richard. The Ancestor s Tale A Pilgrimage to the Dawn ofEvolution. New York Houghton Mifflin, 2004. 

Stephen Gould s writing is elegant, erudite, witty, coherent and forceful - Richard Dawkins, Nature... 

Steve Rose I agree entirely about the reworking of the picture. The issue is whether (A) the levels are ontological versus epistemological, or (B) whether they are simply relating to different discourses about the universe. And one really has to rethink the easy way in which you use the word levels in that context. But I just wanted to come back to your plea at the end for all of us to get together and to talk to one another, because I m absolutely with you in all of your presentation. All I wanted to add is that despite continual pleas on my part at least, Richard Dawkins consistently refuses to discuss these issues with me and I suspect with other people. And... 

As already stated, modern science - even without reaching the extreme reductionism of Richard Dawkins and his Blind Watchmaker (Dawkins, 1990) - does not conform to this view. Paley s metaphor was already negated in his time by Hume and other contemporary philosophers. This does not mean that all scientists are necessarily atheist the meeting point (the easy one) between science and religion is to accept the idea of a God, who created the beginning and the laws of nature, leaving them... 

After attacking Hitching—as well as scientists Richard Goldschmidt and Stephen Jay Gould—for worrying about the eye s complexity, Dawkins goes on to paraphrase Charles Darwin s argument for the plausibility of eye evolution ... 

In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations—that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted. Yet it is an empty argument. One may as well say that the world luckily popped into existence yesterday with all the features it now has. Luck is metaphysical speculation scientific explanations invoke causes. It is almost universally conceded that such sudden events would be irreconcilable with the gradualism Darwin envisioned. Richard Dawkins explains the problem well ... 

I apologize in advance for the complexity of the material, but it is inherent in the point I wish to make. Richard Dawkins can simplify to his heart s content, because he wants to convince his readers that Darwinian evolution is a breeze. In order to understand the barriers to evolution, however, we have to bite the bullet of complexity. 

Paley expresses the design argument so well that he even earns the respect of dedicated evolutionists. Richard Dawkins s The Blind Watchmaker takes its title from Paley s watch analogy but claims that evolution, rather than an intelligent agent, plays the role of the watchmaker ... 

The philosopher friend of Richard Dawkins who thought that David Hume refuted the argument from design was mistaken in his philosophy as well as in his science. Elliott Sober is more successful with his philosophy, but apparently he is unaware of relevant developments in science. Although he thinks Hume was incorrect, Sober is unsympathetic to claims... 

The fact that the mutation-selection process has two parts. .. is brought vividly by Richard Dawkins in his book The Blind Watchmaker. Imagine a device that is something like a combination lock. It is composed of a series of disks placed side by side. On the edge of each disk, the twenty-six letters of the alphabet appear. The disks can be spun separately so that different sequences of letters may appear in the viewing window. 

In The Blind Watchmaker Richard Dawkins tells his readers that even if a statue of the Virgin Mary waved to them, they should not conclude they had witnessed a miracle.9 Perhaps all the atoms of the statue s arm just happened to move in the same direction at once—a low-probability event to be sure, but possible. Most people who saw a statue come to life would... 

J. Diamond. 2001. Snake oil and other preoccupations. Foreword by Richard Dawkins. Reprint in R. Dawkins, A Devil s Chaplain. Boston Houghton Mifflin, 2003. 

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