Philip Ball's Enjoyable Drubbing of Richard Dawkins

John Gray:

"...In a well-known passage at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud declared: “I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation…” What is most in demand at the start of the 21st century, in contrast, is consolation and nothing else. Enlightenment fundamentalism—the insistence by writers such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins that our salvation lies in affirming a highly selective set of “Enlightenment values”—serves this emotional need for meaning rather than any imperative of understanding. Like the religions they disparage, but with less profundity and little evident effect, the varieties of Enlightenment thinking on offer today are balm for the uneasy soul. The scientific-sounding formulae with which they appease their anxiety—the end of history, the flat world, the inexorable but forever delayed process of secularisation—are more fantastical than anything in Freud’s “gloomy mythology.”..."

 In Maharashtra, for a group of people, Richard Dawkins has been a 'deity'  oops "a great social reformer" for some time!...his takedown was necessary, of course the people I referred mayn't learn a thing from this...

 James McConnachie, The Times UK, Jan 7 2004:

 

"...You could read this book as a 500-page drubbing of Richard Dawkins. It is not a personal attack — although some barbed words are aimed — but it is a robust and sustained takedown of the “simplistic”, “distorted”, “barren” and “intellectually thin” notion that biology is all about the gene. There is very much more to life than that, according to Philip Ball. It might even have some meaning.

 

...He wonders why genes were ever worshipped so ardently. Maybe it is because DNA conveniently offers a new home for the age-old idea of an “essence”, or soul. Maybe it has something to do with the male scientists who have so often pushed gene-centric thinking while their female colleagues have pushed back. Ball coyly declines to offer any interpretation of that last, curious fact, but I’m happy to try to fill in. Does glorifying DNA cry up the relatively limited role of the man in the creation of a child?

 

As for Dawkins’s notorious claim that we are machines made by genes, this “alarming gambit” represents “a sterilisation of the life sciences”. It gives the gene “an almost sentient agency it does not possess”. Biologists have developed an allergy to words such as “purpose” and “meaning” — which all too easily open the door to those waiting to usher a god back in. Ball does not want to do that, but he does want to revalorise life — rich, complex multicellular life — while shoving the gene back in its proper place.

 

For Ball, the possession of agency — and purpose, and even meaning — is precisely how you might characterise life. Life, then, is not the servant of the selfish gene. Life happens at other levels. In the cell. In the organism. In us."