On Sun, 28 Mar 2010 15:28:25 -0700 (PDT) Gail Brock
<gbrock_dca at yahoo.com> writes:
> Dawkins' books popularizing science tend to be based on a reductive
> science of determinism which undergirds conservative argument,
> whether he explicitly accepts conservatism or not. It's not just
> the evolutionary psychology. It always bothered me that as the
> Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, he named
> one of his books "The Selfish Gene". He's got to know that the
> majority of the public that hear about the book aren't going to read
> the book and are going to misunderstand the title as meaning that
> people have a gene that makes us selfish. That doesn't contribute
> to public understanding of science and it doesn't do so in a way
> that appears to say that science proves the rightwingers are right
> about human motivation.
Dawkins, of course, wrote "The Selfish Gene," back in the mid-1970s, decades before he became Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. I doubt that at that time he had any inkling that the book would become a bestseller, so I am skeptical that he should be held responsible for the misconceptions of people who were too lazy to read the book. Then again, at the time, he could hardly have anticipated ever becoming Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, since no such position existed at Oxford back then. It having been created in 1995 when Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi endowed a chair at New College, Oxford, for the Public Understanding of Science. I suppose that Dawkins should be taken to task for not being a psychic. But then again, he is a noted skeptic of the paranormal too.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
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