YOU SHOULD LOOK AT my take down of Dawkins' "First Bird To Call Out" explanatory myth because I believe I pretty much shredded one of his foremost contributions to the popular (mis)understanding of science. I mean, he didn't seem to even account for things like the speed of sound and distance when he made it up while sitting in his chair, making up the "indirect evidence" for it the same way. I've been challenging his fanboys and gals to defend it for going on a decade and not one has explained away a single criticism I made of it. Made in response to yet another citation of it in a brawl I was involved in a decade back.
I was not surprised to read that Dawkins' who, sometimes is talked about as an expert in animal behavior, really has never been much interested in animals.
The dogs are generally more Ward’s concern than Dawkins’s; he is not hugely interested in animals. As a child, he preferred to read books while his nature-loving parents John and Jean were out spotting birds and plants. (Jean, aged 98, lives on the family farm in Chipping Norton, outside Oxford, where Dawkins visits her weekly.) Dawkins was born in Nairobi in 1941; until he was eight, the family lived in colonial east Africa where his father worked as an agricultural officer before joining the King’s African Rifles during the second world war. Even then, surrounded by nature at its most vivid, Dawkins remained uninspired. He remembers, as a young child, being taken in a safari car to watch a pride of lions gnawing at a carcass. While the rest of the group stared in fascination, he stayed on the floor playing with his toy cars. He does, however, know every class and order of the animal kingdom, a product of the classical zoological education he received as an undergraduate at Oxford. If he has trouble sleeping, he mentally scrolls through the alphabet and assigns mammals to letters.
As a postgraduate, Dawkins excelled at the early stages of the research process, mulling theoretical questions and coming up with hypotheses. But he lacked patience with the laborious hours of data collection or methodical lab work. His interest in zoology was philosophical, not naturalistic: animals were simply the language he’d chosen to learn in order to interpret the world.
On a recent spring afternoon, sitting in his back garden, he explained the evolution of social insects by imitating an ant whose sole function was to guard the entrance hole to a giant bamboo stick in which the ant colony lived. The ant had an elongated head that it used like a door to block the hole and prevent the entrance of intruders. Dawkins hunched in his chair and stuck his head forward, then jerked it back, blocking and unblocking the hole. The performance was strangely captivating, but the ant was simply a means to explain the social behaviour of insects. “Everybody knew that if Richard asked you why you were interested in zoology,” said Kate Lessells, a former student of Dawkins in the 1970s and now a field biologist, “‘Because I like animals,’ was not an answer that was going to go down well.”
Instead, his students knew him as “the computer man”: a pioneer in the developing strand of biology based on the mathematical modelling of animal behaviour. He would regularly stay up all night writing code on the sole computer in the zoology department, an Elliot 803 – at the time a relatively compact machine, now the kind of elaborate object kept for historical interest by the Science Museum. When it broke down, the joke among undergraduates at the time was that Dawkins had been trying to “wire himself into it”.
Considering the incompetence of his alleged description of animal behavior, created in his imagination to support his debasement of "altruism" into gene selfishness, he should have gotten out and about more and looked at some animals.
I'm also asked what I mean by "brawls." Arguments online can be civil and rational and based in evidence but most of them are anything but that. They're not "debates" they seldom are arguments (you argue facts, not opinions) considering how dirty and pointless they tend to be "brawls" is the most honest word for them. I find most of them to be useful to teach me how degraded the life of the mind is among the English typing People in the age of mass media and the internet. I think even for the alleged thinking classes they indicate that we've lost grounds since the scholastic period, we haven't gained on it. Which isn't an argument for going back in time, that can't be done nor should it, the Creation moves on from the past. What it means is we need a better future than the one in the offing right now.
No comments:
Post a Comment