 | Price Comparisons: Rental | | Sorry, the textbook you were looking for is not available as Rental, at any of the stores we searched. | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com | Richard Dawkins has an opinion on everything biological, it seems, and in A Devil's Chaplain, everything is biological. Dawkins weighs in on topics as diverse as ape rights, jury trials, religion, and education, all examined through the lens of natural selection and evolution. Although many of these essays have been published elsewhere, this book is something of a greatest-hits compilation, reprinting many of Dawkins' most famous recent compositions. They are well worth re-reading. His 1998 review of Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Fashionable Nonsense is as bracing an indictment of academic obscurantism as the book it covered, although the review reveals some of Dawkins' personal biases as well. Several essays are devoted to skillfully debunking religion and mysticism, and these are likely to raise the hackles of even casual believers. Science, and more specifically evolutionary science, underlies each essay, giving readers a glimpse into the last several years' debates about the minutiae of natural selection. In one moving piece, Dawkins reflects on his late rival Stephen Jay Gould's magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, and clarifies what it was the two Darwinist heavyweights actually disagreed about. While the collection showcases Dawkins' brilliance and intellectual sparkle, it brings up as many questions as it answers. As an ever-ardent champion of science, honest discourse, and rational debate, Dawkins will obviously relish the challenge of answering them. --Therese Littleton |
Average Customer Rating:   Brilliant writing, occasionally infuriating Diabetes: Sugar-Coated Crisis: Who Gets it, Who Profits and How to Stop it
I had long resisted reading Richard Dawkins, because of his reputation as a militant opponent of religion, New Age culture, and fuzzy thinking in general. I thought I would find him too polemical, too much on the attack all the time.
Now I regret waiting. I picked up a copy of A Devil's Chaplain and discovered that Mr. Dawkins is an excellent writer. He's also an evenhanded and effective advocate for science in general and evolutionary biology in particular. A Devil's Chaplain provides a range of Dawkins' essays: book reviews, eulogies, treatises on evolution, attacks on religion, and views on scientific/political issues of the day.
Most are interesting and entertaining reads, but some are nonetheless infuriating. I notice large gaps in his understanding of the relationship between science and society, and a reverence for evolution and its theorists that I don't yet share.
There are six sections in this book. The first features a variety of brilliant essays on topics such as cloning, deconstructionism, science vs. mysticism, trial by jury, and educational excellence. This was my favorite part of the book.
The second section is devoted to a celebration of evolutionary theory, with essays such as "Darwin Triumphant," and "Genes Aren't Us." I believe in evolution, although I don't find random mutation a sufficient explanation for it. But Dawkins clearly believe it is the most wonderful theory and process in the world. He even quotes a colleague saying that there is no use arguing with anyone who doesn't believe evolution is the most important idea in the world. If you're not quite as excited about evolution as he is, you might find this part a bit boring.
The third section is devoted mostly to attacks on religion. I'm no fan of religion, or especially of monotheism. But Dawkins doesn't acknowledge religion's excellent reasons for being. Yes, for rulers and religious leaders, it serves as a form of social control. But the billions of adherents must be getting something out of it! You can rail against religion all you want from the safe and pleasant hillside of upper middle-class academia, but people with hard lives in the trenches will have trouble hearing you, unless you can offer something better. By not acknowledging the perceived benefits of religion, he weakens his arguments. They wind up sounding shrill.
The fifth section consists of book reviews, many of works by Steven Jay Gould, the American writer on evolution. Dawkins and Gould had some well-known debates on issues in evolution, but they might mainly be of interest to those in the field.
The fourth section includes eulogies for Hitchhiker's Guide author Douglas Adams and scientist W.D. Hamilton. Here we see Dawkins' personal side, with wonderful details and anecdotes lighting the lives of the deceased. The sixth section has book reviews relating to Africa, an interesting mix of novels, personal memoirs and science.
I like this book very much. My complaint is the pride of place Dawkins uncritically gives to science over less fact-based ways of thinking. Without doubt, science is the most powerful way to find truth. But for that reason, it has been among greatest causes of harm. Human society has in no way been ready to handle the truths that science, and its kid brother technology, have brought us.
Religion brought us the crusades and the inquisition. But science brought us the internal combustion engine, mechanized agriculture, and the atomic bomb. The first has fouled the air with the potential - if global warming theorists are correct - of ending human civilization for all time. The second has stripped the land of soil, and the bomb, well, we know about that. Science placed in the hands of people motivated by greed has led, among other things, to the near-extermination of Native Americans and Australians at the hands of European immigrants. While humanitarians have used science to cure many diseases, medical technology, placed in the hands of a death-denying culture, has led to extraordinarily expensive suffering for millions of people who live a medically-supported life in a form that barely deserves the name.
Still, I plan to read more of Dawkins' books in future. As a science writer myself - see my books Diabetes: Sugar-coated Crisis and The Art of Getting Well, available on Amazon - I appreciate his style, clarity, and humor.
The Imaginery Iceberg In this book, in vivid and virile prose, and many passages of stunning beauty, Richard Dawkins has created an illusion of certainty on one of the most critical issues of contemporary society: What does it mean to be a human being. The book is a collection of articles written over several years, with a literary grace and gift for imagery that is almost poetry.
The book is not a scientific treatise, but it waves the flag of science on every page. The science is sound, the science is breathtaking, for Richard Dawkins is a superb evolutionary biologist. But he speaks from the pulpit of Ethology, yet ventures into the domain of Anthropology.
Ethology studies animal behavior and yet he applies the principles and findings of Ethology to human beings, for one salient reason: he is convinced that human beings are nothing more than refined animals, and this collection of essays tries to illlustrate this from the findings of the fathers of Ethology: Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz.
"To speak of animal is one thing, to speak of the human animal is quite another" - This was not a principle accepted by Tinbergen, and in Tinbergen's latter years, Richard Dawkins was his pupil. Instead of comparing human behavior and animal behavior, they applied their findings in animal behavior to human beings and came up with scientific monstrosities in human psychology and behavior, creating a pseudo-science, not recognizing that human beings have free-will which determines most human behavior. Of course,Richard Dawkins denies free-will in human beings. All human behavior is determined by genes, DNA and the mechanisms of Natural Selection, Descent with Modification and the Survival of the Fittest. His evolutionary science is sound, his use of it is off the charts. His claim that everything is biology has become almost an obsession and it determines almost everything he writes. Beware the man of one idea.
He breaks the primary rule of reasoned thinking: Never Deny: Seldom Affirm: Always distinguish. His inability to distinguish puts him in the circus tent of P. T. Barnum, with his exotic hoaxes. "A Devil's Chaplain" is full of literary and scientific hoaxes, but to call it science, and to give it credence, is to be hoodwinked into believing things like the Cardiff Monster and Piltdown Man.
It is a tragedy that such a brilliant scientist like Richard Dawkins would use his science and his scientific gifts to build a platform for atheism. The brilliantly written essays of "A Devil's Chaplain" is a clever use of evolutionary science to support a personal agenda that has nothing to do with science. Sooner or later someone will recognize that the emperor has no clothes.
Father Clifford Stevens Always something more to learn This is a book to sit and read. You are going to reflect why the evolutionary understanding is great!!! Dawkins addresses some myths Some excellent essays. A touch too close to being a bit racist here and there, but perhaps that was inaccuracy of language. For the first time I think I actually understand something about evolution. His point about the 98% figure of genetic similarity with chimps was well made. He cited the fact that if you compare two books, there will be a lot of common letters and the figure would suggest similarity. But if you were to compare them sentence by sentence, they would probably share only a tiny fraction of commonality.
What I still don't understand about theorists on evolution is how they still discuss superiority or desirability for breeding in terms of strength, speed, size etc. After many hundreds of thousands of years during which human cooperation in agriculture, shared civilisation and eventually technological change has transformed the success rate of the species, why are qualities of cooperation, constancy or intellect now not also included in the factors that influence natural selection? Perhaps they are. Maybe I should read late Darwin.
The idea that atheists just go one God further was also a point well made. Many of us would admit to being atheists when it comes to Mithras, Zeus, Thor, etc etc. Of all the Gods, most people who claim not to be atheists probably only admit a belief in one and thus reject thousands of other. It's a bit like claiming to be a vegetarian on the grounds that you don't eat duck, but do eat all the rest of the animal world.
The point about cloning and identical twins was made a few too many times, I think, but then it was a collection of essays. It is a point, however, that the non-scientist would find it hard to relate to, since for someone from that starting position the twins are "natural" and the "clone" is not, despite the fact that genetically they represent identical concepts. The position would be really interesting, however, if the twins, or triplets or quads etc arose as a result of in vitro fertilisation and then implantation, and hence were not "natural".
Nobody does it better, but . . . Richard Dawkins is more eloquent in explaining biology and more forthright in disparaging its critics than anyone else writing in English today. However, the Greeks said even Homer nods, and I want to pursue a thread in this collection of reviews, prefaces and articles where I think Dawkins does not follow his own argument.
A recurrent proposition in these essays is that humans evolved in Africa (even Dawkins haters could be charmed by his essays on his return to Kenya) to meet African conditions. Surprisingly, he does not then inquire: How does it come about that a genetic armamentarium designed for camping on the plains of Africa produced a species capable of both inventing absurd religions and working out, through direct observation and indirect, abstract arguments, what stars are? What possible selective value could having a brain capable of either have to a caveman?
The answer, of course, is that the mental function evolved for reasons unrelated to stars or spooks but once evolved proved to have other capacities. In medicine, it is not uncommon for physicians to discover that a drug selected for one organ or syndrome has a completely unexpected, positive effect on some other organ or syndrome. (And, of course, it is even more common for it to have an unexpected, negative effect elsewhere.)
The significance of this is that it opens the door to a special status for humans. Dawkins does not want to concede this, claiming, for example, that if we were aware of the continuous genetic gradient between us and chimpanzees, we would not countenance any fundamental difference between us and, therefore, would not `sacrifice' chimps in medical experiments.
This is very strange proposition for a professional zoologist to be making. What are species for?
The genetic continuity is present, obviously, and, as Dawkins himself sometimes says, goes right back to an ur-organism. So, where does the quantitative difference become qualitative? If it is unthinkable to torture chimpanzees (or, to put it positively, as Dawkins does, if it should be thinkable to imagine interbreeding with them), why not object to eradicating mosquitoes that carry the malaria plasmodium that kills a half a million African babies each year (or maybe a million, who's counting?).
One barrier is to claim for humans a soul. This is nonsense. No one has ever seen such a thing. But another barrier is the capability of being moral actors, and everybody has observed that.
It is not obvious that moral action has selective advantages for inclusive fitness. Dawkins himself worries that having too many babies risks famine. Indiscriminate breeding, without worrying about moral consequences, is likely to leave more descendants, at least in the nearest subsequent generations, than discriminate, morally driven breeding -- or non-breeding, as the case may be.
Surely the evolution of a trait that confers voluntary selective unfitness on a species makes that species qualitatively different from all other species that cannot do it?
I expect this deviationism is a result of Dawkins's desire to see certain outcomes. Very natural it is, too, but it needs to be struggled against. Evolution up to us was non-deterministic. We should keep it that way.
Otherwise, this is a marvelous book. |  |
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