The Dawkins Apologists crawl out of the woodwork!

I knew my recent criticisms or Richard Dawkins would enrage the usual crowd. I’m used to it and I knew it was coming. Also unsurprisingly, the noise is coming from Jerry Coyne, who is always willing to praise the hierarchy of atheism.

But the main error of both her [Rachel Johnson, Dawkins’ interviewer] queries as well as Myers’s article is to claim that because there are bad behaviors inspired by both Christianity and Islam, they must be equally bad. And if you say that, you’re a bigot. The error, of course, is the neglect of the real issue: how often do bad behavior promoted by the two faiths occur? Further, says Myers, both the Bible and Qur’an promote some bad behaviors, so the two faiths again must be pretty much equally bad. Here I’d disagree, maintaining that the Qu’ran is full of more hatred, animus, and oppressive dictates than is the Bible. (Yes, I’ve read both.) But that’s really irrelevant to the question at hand, as most modern Christians don’t follow the bad parts of the Bible, while the Qur’an hasn’t been equally defanged.

The problem with that complaint is that I haven’t claimed that Christianity and Islam are equally bad. To the contrary, I think that Christianity and Islam are equally complicated; there are people in each faith who use their beliefs to motivate good social behavior, and others who use it to justify horrors, and that the bigotry lies in treating all members of a religion as the same. Here, Coyne is giving Xians the benefit of the doubt, and claiming that most have denied the “bad parts of the Bible,” while implying that most Muslims are accepting every jot and tittle of the Qur’an. Christianity has been defanged! Except, presumably, the ones in the Republican party that want to institute an American theocracy. We’ll just close our eyes and pretend they don’t exist.

Is he even aware that the US is on the edge of a precipice? That our next election could be our last, if a certain madman and his delusional, evangelical followers get their way? I’m not claiming that they are worse than Jihadi terrorists, but that they’re pretty awful, and that the majority of Muslims have no desire to perpetrate the terrors that bigots like to smear all followers of Allah with.

He also conveniently forgets that Dawkins said this:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

I haven’t. I agree with that, actually. I’m not the ones making excuses for Christianity: the god of the Bible has not been re-written, but suddenly some former New Atheists would have us think Jehovah has reformed, and now Christianity is just pretty Christmas bells and cathedrals and lovely parish churches, and they’re making that argument entirely because they want to make sure we don’t compromise in our hatred of those evil Muslim terrorists, who know nothing of beauty and peace and art and science. The bigotry lies in the insane polarization that is being promoted. If only Islam could be defanged, so they could have beautiful cathedrals, too!

Here Myers makes the two mistakes I mentioned above. First, he sees no difference between the proportion of bad stuff in the Bible and the bad stuff in the Qur’an. I do see a difference (I presume Myers has read both, as I have), but, as I said this is really irrelevant.

Except, of course, that I don’t make that claim (which is irrelevant anyway, he says, despite making that the bulk of his argument.) Both religions contain archaic horrors and bad ideas. The reason he and Coyne are bigots are that they pretend that the cherished traditions of their familiar religions are better and more important than the comfortable happy traditions of Muslims, and that Christianity has been “defanged” while Islam is a nest of evil. Remember, Dawkins’ first complaint was that he didn’t want to hear that Ramadan was promoted instead of Easter. What’s wrong with Ramadan? I don’t care. I celebrate neither Easter nor Ramadan, and I don’t worry that Christianity or Islam are using their holidays to cloak heinous, barbaric practices.

He has one final gotcha for me.

The main question is where one wants to live: in a Christian or a Muslim country, and whether Islam has more pernicious effects on the modern world than does Christianity. Which religion promotes behaviors that lead to a better, more desirable society?

Oh, that is easy. I’d rather live in a secular country, but since he’s made it a binary choice, I’ll pick the country where my native language, English, is spoken, and where nobody is trying to bomb me into a bloody paste. That narrows my options down to primarily Western countries, which are mostly Christian. I think it would be wise to avoid living in countries that have been wrecked by colonialism, like, say, anything in the Middle East, or that have been crippled by sanctions or brutal, American-led wars.

If we want to identify religions that have had the most pernicious effects on the modern world, we really ought to focus on evangelical Christianity, which dominates in the most powerful nations, and which is now endorsing genocide of Palestinians, and which has dispatched missionaries to various countries in Africa to legislate for death penalties against gay people, or which is striving to demolish American democracy, or which is actively trying to inject anti-scientific nonsense into educational curricula. A Christian sneezing in America has a greater influence in the world than a Muslim preaching jihad in the ruins of Iraq.

Oh, but I forget — I’m supposed to reduce the history and culture and humanity of entire peoples to just their religion, where Christianity gets a pass on any flaws while Islam is a monolithic univocal monster. Sorry, only bigots do that. QED.

Dawkins is one step away from consulting a dictionary to define biology

Did you know that Richard Dawkins began his career as an ethologist? He got his Ph.D. studying animal behavior under Niko Tinbergen. If you’re an ethologist, you might study things like courtship behavior and parental investment and feeding strategies etc., etc., etc. Dawkins studied how animals make choices.

That was in 1966. Apparently he’s forgotten all that ever since.

Sex is not defined by chromosomes, nor by anatomy, nor by psychology or sociology, nor by personal inclination, nor by “assignment at birth”, but by gamete size. It happens to be embryologically DETERMINED by chromosomes in mammals and (in the opposite direction) birds, by temperature in some reptiles, by social factors in some fish. But it is universally DEFINED by the binary distinction between sperms and eggs.
You may argue about “gender” if you wish (biologists have better things to do) but sex is a true binary, one of rather few in biology.

Somehow, an awful lot of biologists study sexual behavior — like lekking, or sexual displays, or fidelity, and on and on — that don’t necessarily involve sperm collection or measuring ovulation or that kind of thing. It is absurd to insist that only gametes define sex. I recognize spider sexes by the morphology of their palps, and by their differences in behavior, not gametes. I see the birds flying outside my window, and I discriminate sexes by color, primarily. To say that biologists have better things to do than study gender is ridiculous. Every biologist who looks at the plumage of birds or watches the courtship of spiders is studying a phenomenon far removed from basic gamete formation yet is an indispensable, unavoidable, intrinsic consequence of sex in that species…and the animal isn’t getting a semen count before engaging in it.

This is true of human biology, too. People don’t have to check their gonads before engaging in all kinds of sexual behaviors; they would rather not have to worry about the sex police telling them what they can and can’t do, and generally they disregard the prudes in private anyway. You can be a feminine man or a masculine woman, or any shade in between or beyond, and gametes don’t come into play at all, except in reproduction. Reproduction is not the sole function of sex.

Dawkins is just being an extreme reductionist to the point he’s making himself and his position look silly. Go ahead, all you reactionary biologists, rant about how there can be only two true sexes because people have some cells that are almost never seen in public, in defiance of all the other valid signals they openly display. Better biologists will go on recognizing all the factors that define sex without your self-imposed, narrow-minded blinders.

P.S. Dawkins is not an embryologist. No, sex isn’t solely determined by chromosomes embryologically, but by a battery of influences that shape the embryo, including a few genes on some chromosomes. He is an evolutionary biologist, and he doesn’t recognize that the fluidity of sex determination mechanisms suggests that maybe biology isn’t as rigid as he thinks?

Dawkins embarrasses himself again

Oh no, Richard Dawkins, stop. He’s asked in an interview what he thinks of doctors being arrested for gender affirming care, and his old eloquence is completely gone. He stutters, he stammers, he struggles to get an answer out, and he looks for an excuse to evade the question — for adults, he asks, or children. Like it makes a difference, like there’s an age that justifies suffering. He finally gets out…

I would have strong objections to doctors injecting minors, children, or performing surgery on them to change their sex

Note that this does not answer the question. Should doctors be jailed for providing gender-affirming care? I don’t care if someone has opinions and objects, the question is whether it is right for the state to arrest care-givers for giving care?

OK, so he doesn’t think children should be treated for this issue — not that they’re getting sex change operations anyway, they might at best be given therapy and reversible puberty blockers. What about adults?

If they’ve thought about it properly

As if trans people don’t even think long and hard about it, and as if he’s the right person to judge if they’ve properly thought about it. He goes on to say that it might be OK if if they struggle and suffer over it. You can be trans, according to Dawkins, if you’ve been made sufficiently miserable.

What we’re seeing now is a fashion, a craze, mimetic epidemic which is spreading like an epidemic of measles or something like that

Oh, just go ahead and spit out the words woke mind virus, it’s what you really want to say, boomer.

That doesn’t even make sense. Is measles a meme now? Is it really a good idea to compare a fashion to a serious, life threatening disease? Is the state of being trans a biological disease at all?

Dawkins really needs to learn that if he doesn’t have an informed opinion on a topic, he should refrain from answering…especially if he’s just going to regurgitate that anti-trans crap that is so popular over there on the other side of the Atlantic.

Did UATX increase their status, or did Dawkins diminish his?

I think you know the answer.

This is not a joke.

Somebody really needs to take him aside and explain that he’s making a lot of really bad decisions lately.

The Dawkins ennui

Richard Dawkins got a major fluffing from The Times this weekend, and I don’t care enough to try to get around the paywall. Sorry. We all know what kind of conservative BS he’s going to say, and the worst of it (I hope — if there’s worse in the article, I don’t want to know about it) is right there up front in the blurb, and in the title, even.

Richard Dawkins: ‘Race is a spectrum. Sex is pretty damn binary’

This doesn’t even make sense. Pretty damn binary — so he’s adding vague qualifiers to something he wants to assert is only one thing or another. Everything is black and white, as long as those shades of gray get ignored, I guess. Let’s also ignore the fact that there is a wide spectrum within each sex, with femaleness and maleness having huge individual variation, with overlap. These are forced categories. You’ve decided that, by definition, there are only two possibilities allowed, therefore everyone must be wedged into one or the other, and you look with horror on the boundary conditions that show your classification scheme is inadequate.

What does he think should be done with individuals who are in the pretty part of his damn binary? Shall we just ignore them, pretend they don’t exist, maybe torture them into non-existence so they don’t clutter up your boundaries?

Good grief, he’s an evolutionary biologist. Does he also insist that species are pretty damn binary, you’re either a member of one or not, and there are no individuals who fall into any kind of hybrid state? Embrace the blurriness of the boundary conditions. That’s where all the interesting stuff happens.

I am privileged to see the opening paragraphs of the article. I don’t need more.

There’s not much that frightens Richard Dawkins. He shrugs off his regular hate mail from angry evangelicals, occasionally taking to YouTube to read it aloud. He has never backed down from his withering criticisms of Islamic fundamentalism, despite the potential for blowback. He’s happy to pick intellectual fights with eminent fellow scientists and has even been known to find fault (hard to imagine, I realise) with the odd journalist or two.

But Dawkins tells me there are two things he does fear: one is being cancelled by the left. The other is hang-gliding. I think he’s probably in more danger from the former.

There is so much hand-wringing on the right about getting “cancelled”, whatever that means. It seems to be a rather ineffectual state in which some people stop treating you as a demi-god and are more willing to criticize what you say and do, and it’s only a threat to people who consider themselves deserving of uncritical adulation.

By that definition, sorry, Richard. You were cancelled long ago, as were we all. If not by one group, by another (like, say, the American Humanists). Get used to it.

By the way, this photo was embarrassing.

I will charitably assume that it was the newspaper’s idea to put him into a christ-like pose, but really, Richard, you can say no. Tamp down that ego a little bit and just realize that an occasional fit of humility will serve you better nowadays.

Richard Dawkins loses the plot

Apparently, there’s a bit of a row going on over in the UK because Cambridge University is planning to impose a policy that would require Cambridge’s academics, students and visiting speakers to treat others and their opinions with “respect”. This is bugging a few people, who don’t want to respect others, and they want to change the word “respect” to “tolerate”, which is in itself a revealing bit of jiggery-pokery. I mean, really, asking people to treat others with respect is not an onerous demand: I’ve listened to creationists and Republicans speaking on campus, and managed treat them with respect even while regarding their ideas as horseshit, and being able to tear into them with questions. It’s not hard. It’s also a demand with a strange context.

Supported by the actor Stephen Fry, who read English at Cambridge, and Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering, Ahmed fears the new code could be used to stifle views deemed to be “disrespectful” on subjects such as transgender rights, anti-vaccination, religion, race or climate change. They fear it could lead to academics who satirise certain views being sacked.

Mock away! The only restriction I see that might be in place is that you don’t get to dehumanize people over their gender, their politics, their religion, or their race. What I see here is typical right-wing paranoia — a fear that they might be abused in the same way they abuse minorities.

As usual in these academic matters in the UK, we just have to get the opinion of Richard Dawkins. So he appeared on this radio program (skip ahead to the 1:44 mark to hear Dawkins), and just totally embarrasses himself.

The radio host brings up a message from a listener, Zoe. Zoe says “as a post-op transsexual woman married to a man and being a respectful member of society, I would hope to be respected as a person rather than being merely tolerated, otherwise incorrect assumptions and bigotry will thrive,” and akss what Dawkins would say to Zoe. This is his reply.

I would say if she wants to be called she, I am very happy to call her she. That’s a matter of courtesy. But if she wants me to say she’s a woman, when she has an XY karyotype, then as a biologist, then I would say that I would define a woman, as a biologist, as a member of the species Homo sapiens with XX karyotype. That’s a matter of definition. People can say what they want to be called, and I’m happy as a matter of courtesy, I do this myself, a person who was a man who becomes a woman, I’m happy to use pronouns like she, but I’m not happy to be dictated to and told that you must use this pronoun as a matter of law or coercion.

First problem: that doesn’t address the point at all! He’s rambling off on a tangent that has nothing to do with the issue brought up. Does he understand how someone might see “tolerance” as a minimal expectation? Zoe wants to be respected as an equal member of society, not as some aberration to be tolerated.

She’s not asking about what pronoun she’d prefer. He’s not being particularly magnaminous by conceding to address her as she wants, as if we should all appreciate his graciousness. This is minimal courtesy he is offering.

WHat does he do next? He offers some unasked-for pedantry, telling us how he, as a biologist, defines “woman”, as a way of saying that he does not regard Zoe as a woman. Very respectful!

He’s also wrong. “Woman” is a complex multifactorial entity, and it is not identical with “reproductive female”, as he is using it. As a biologist, I would not analogize womanhood with the function of one half of a breeding pair of fruit flies or spiders or zebrafish or mice. Furthermore, I would not make the mistake of correlating even that with a simplistic version of chromosome organization. A biologist should know better.

He’s not particularly consistent. He calls Zoe “a man who becomes a woman”, right after tellins us that she isn’t really a woman. He needs to get his story straight.

Finally, this petty declaration that he doesn’t like being dictated to…is he also being dictated to when polite convention tells him address a woman (even the ones he recognizes as a True Woman!) by masculine pronouns? No one is talking about legal impositions, and the only coercion is the same kind that compels us to behave in mutually respectful ways as members of a civil society.

So let’s get it straight: what the Richard Dawkinses and Stephen Frys want is to be able to exclude transgender men and women from their civil society.

OH NO RICHARD DAWKINS NO!

Chuck Asay

His reputation would be so much better if he never ever discovered Twitter. Which is to say, he’s done it again.

It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology.

That word “work” sure is doing a lot of work in there. If only we could ignore ideology, politics, and morality, as well as philosophy, sociology, the limitations of our own knowledge, and empathy, why, then of course eugenics would “work”! All we have to do is set aside our humanity and reduce existence to selective breeding, and we could produce radical biological change in human populations in just a few generations. Of course, we’ll have no idea of any unintended genetic consequences (there will be many, just as there have been with cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses), and we’ll have to live with the kind of ideology that promotes eugenics, which has its own set of consequences, and we’ll be producing generations of people that can only live with a fascist ideology, but hey, it’s just selection, we know that will “work”.

Is he even aware that dismissing the trivial issues of politics and morality actually is an ideological decision? It always surprises me when smart people decry “ideology” in general, as if they’re oblivious to the fact that their perspective is totally shaped by their own ideology. You have an ideology, I have objective knowledge of the facts. How dare you annoy me with your ideology in the midst of my logical defense of the objective utility of eugenics?

I also have to ask…has anyone ever made the argument that eugenics can’t produce biological change? I don’t think so. I think everyone is aware that eugenic policies can make sweeping demographic changes. Just ask the Jews of Poland, 90% of whom were exterminated. Ask the Hutus of Burundi — over 100,000 people murdered was an effective culling. It “worked” if we judge such things solely in terms of accomplishing a shift in the population. No one questions that it “worked”, we just recognize that when eugenics is working as intended it is a horror.

His last line is backwards. Ideologies often ignore facts, like the simple fact that every nation that has tried to implement eugenics, such as the United States and Nazi Germany, has ended up causing immeasurable misery, suffering, and death with no desirable outcome as a reward, and just ends up digging themselves into a pit of contempt and hatred that can only be escaped with blood and destruction. I guess if you redefine “work” to mean that, Richard Dawkins made a true statement.