Monday, February 15, 2010
Quote of the Day
When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer’s Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship lectures, Barrow laughed and said, “You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you’re not really a scientist. You’re a biologist.”
http://www.templeton.org/milestones/milestones_2006-04.asp
Ouch
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Outstanding!
ReplyDeleteNot to pile on but...okay I will pile on. Here's Stephen Barr on some of the whoppers he came across in his review of The Devil's Chaplain.
ReplyDelete"To call it low-grade intellectual poodling would perhaps be too harsh; but it is certainly not high-grade. The first thing to note is Dawkins' carelessness with facts. (This is especially strange in a man who so emphasizes the factuality of science, with its “testability, evidential support, precision, [and] quantifiability”). Here is a small sampler: speaking of neutrinos, he says that “on average one passes through you every second.” Actually many billions of neutrinos pass through you every second, a fact well known to science buffs. In explaining an evolutionary idea he states that a certain quantity “grows as a power function,” though any mathematically minded person would see that it grows exponentially. He attempts an elementary combinatoric calculation and gets it wrong. He discusses a well-known quantum phenomenon in terms that are incorrect. If one reads enough of Dawkins, one gets used to this sort of thing; in a previous book he showed that he did not know the difference between a cosmic ray and a gamma ray."
Barrow was right.
;)