General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Kick if you agree with this assessment about the influence of religion on people. [View all]struggle4progress
(118,514 posts)Dawkins is a privileged child of upper-class British colonial upbringing, and he's very sure he's smarter and more perceptive than everyone else
I don't doubt that he's a clever man, but he's not the scientific demi-god some of his devotees think. His actual scientific work is quite limited. He managed to find someone to fund a chair at Oxford on "public understanding of science" with the condition that the funding depended on Dawkins being the first recipient of the chair -- which was rather outside the standard understanding there that the faculty control academic appointments -- and he spent most of his supposedly "scientific" career writing popular expositions, not actually doing science. He's largely remembered for works like "The Selfish Gene," which popularized an idea, that was familiar to geneticists long before Dawkins came along: namely, the idea that natural selection might be regarded as operating on genes. The idea is interesting, and for some purposes it is useful, but it is clearly not the whole story on natural selection, since in the higher animals it is the organism itself as a whole and not the bare gene that survives and reproduces -- or fails to survive/reproduce
There's quite a lot that's important and interesting to say about human affairs from a purely naturalistic PoV but I don't think Dawkins has ever said any of it
His anti-religious specialization consists largely of cheapshots, such as sneering about "fairies in the garden"