Dawkins - a different view???

[texasrose]

Following on from the cracking Dawkins thread a coplue of weeks ago...

Did anyone read the article by Bryan Appleyard on Dawkins in the Sunday Times Culture section yesterday?

It was interesting...basically he is saying that at the moment the serious study of science is being eroded (eg Reading Uni has annoucnced plans to shut its physics dept due to lack of would-be physics undergrads) but bookshops are full of science-for-laypeople books such as our friend Dawkins. In other words people don't want to devote themselves to the study of science but want to feel that they are 'informed' of scientific theory.

Appleyard reckons that one effect of people like Dawkins (and he puts Stephen Hawking in this catagory) is that with their definite certain tone of voice, they create a brick wall of 'this is true, you'd better get used to it'. This is in oposition to the spirit of true scientific endeavour which says 'We don't know so much about the world, let's do all that we can to find out' and encourages young people to become scientists in order to join in. AS it is the impression is one of a scientific heterodoxy which you have to agree with if you want to appear educated (not exactly conducive to discovery). He also says that Dawkins et al have taken the 'awe and wonder' out of science and that there is no implicit reason why science should have to be so anti-religion, but that these scientists have used 'science' to bang their own personal drums.

I'm interested because a) I am religious (Christian), b) To me a sense of awe and wonder at life is fundamental to understanding yourself nad engaging with any issues (environment, animal rights, human suffering etc etc etc) and I really want my dcs to experience that awe and wonder at the world's diversity and beauty as they grow up, and c) I am concerned at the way that science is taught; not v. inspirational in most cases - why is that so? And how can I inspire my dcs with an interest in discovering the world?

And does anyone totally disagree with Appleyard? Does anyoe find Hawkins inspirational? Not that I want to start a row of course but I am genuinely interested to know what you think.

It's interesting, I am massively into natural history and so are both dds, yet I don't think of that as scientific at all. Perhaps it's because it feeds me spiritually.

I believe Richard Hammond has written a book on making science more interesting for children, but I don't know what age it is for.

Planet Earth is agreat book, dd1 is reading it with me atm, there are animals in there I've never heard of.

nearlythree, natural history would have been so much poorer had it not been for ministers of religion - Gilbert White , the contributors to the Statistical Accounts of Scotland , and many lesser-known vicars whose collections are now in museums. I'm sure they had some spiritual purpose to their studies, but it was still science.

So true, Hallgerda.
My PhD research was on an early 19th century traveller and collector who was ordained as a vicar, and the corresponding networks and philosophical (ie scientific) societies he was part of were heavily dominated by clergy as well.
He definitely saw the whole scientific project as being religious in aim - showing the wonders of God's creation. This was before the evolution debates got going so at that point there was less of a sense of conflict with the Bible.

Yes, Gilbert White is very famous. Of course it's science, it's just odd that it doesn't feel like science to me.

Of course one of the biggest obstacles for many Christians to overcome with darwinism wasn't the disproval of creationism, it was Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' hypothese with obviously doesn't fit well with the idea of a beneficent Creator.

It doesnt fit at all with creationism! Survival of the fittest is a completely different view of how things have evolved and gets rid of any need for God imo.

But survival of the fittest, as I understand it, is no longer thought to be a correct hypothesis of how things evolved. Isn't it now 'survival of the most co-operative'?

I think that depends on your definition of "fittest", which could be considered to have a cooperation element to it.

I'm pretty sure 'fittest' as in survival of the fittest is in reference to those that leave the most offsring. an individual's 'fitness' level is a measure of surviving offspring, especially those that go on to reproduce as well. that is an individual that produces viable offspring is more fit than an individual that doesn't, even though the non-reproducing individual may appear to be stronger, faster, etc... Good grief listen to me waffle!

You could take 'fittest' to mean 'fit for purpose', but for so long it was taken as meaning strongest/most ruthless. Another essential is that predators leave enough of their prey to be able to reproduce to keep up the food supply.

Dawkins answers the questions in yesterday's Indie I do like his repsonse to the Church of Richard Dawkins question.

That was a really excellent article. Thanks for posting it. Fitness for purpose has nothing to do with aggression or strength, otherwise it wouldn't apply to, say, moths, which it does. It means the best adapted to their environment to produce the most healthy offspring.

Fabulous read thank you!

Agree with Pruni.

Reading the Selfish Gene when I was 16 blew my teenage mind and almost 20 yrs later I am still enthused by it all (professional ecologist).

Nearlythree is right.
The superficial view is that "fittest" means big & strong. Yet evolution shows this to be quite wrong.
A tigher or lion is "fitter" than a rat, but look at who is the endangered species.
Even amongst humans we know that in the Japanese POW camps the bigger men died first because they needed more food, a principle that applies acorss other species.
Human brains use around 25% of our energy budget sitting down. That's very expensive, and we observe smaller brains in places that have had famine, or where the mother has had some sort of veggie food fetish.

Black people are more likely to have sickle cell anemia which is both painful and frequently fatal.
But it makes you partially resistant to malaria. It's a trade off. Another is is where white people get more skin cancer because of the lack of protection, black people can suffer from vitamin
shortages.
Evolution finds trade offs, the solutions are very rarely "perfect".

here is a link to a well-written explanation of what fitness means in reference to 'survival of the fittest' explanation of biological fitness

It's OK, but is light upon a critical aspect of evolution.
Evolution and "survival of the fittests" is purely a backward looking effect.
This is how we get testable hypotheses out of evolutionary theory as ooposed to the various dishonest forms of superstition pushed by the dimmer end of Christians.

Evolution predicts that animals may be superbly adapted to a given environment, but that in many cvases they will be adapted to a different set of facts than are presently experienced.

For instance humans evolved in an environment with very plentiful vitamin C, and so it didn't matter that our ancestors mutated in a way that broke the relevant gene.
Marsupials in environments without mammalian predators are pathetically trusting. Good optimisation, since running away consumes a lot of energy, and stresses the body. Not one "thought ahead" to cope with things that want to eath them. That's why so many went extinct.

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Also nowadays we have "punctuated evolution" which has it going in bursts. In certain periods, ther are ecological niches, and those who exploit it first can win, even if they are truly crap.

My favourite is the Tree Kangaroo

And yes, it frequently does fall out of trees.
"fittest" doesn't even mean good, it means less bad than the opposition, or better still as in this animal's evolution, moving to a place where there is no competition.

Pruni - I don't think fittest means strongest etc. But I think it's been interpreted that way and that's why many Christians have struggled with it, certainly in its early days. I once heard a great piece on R4 about how Darwin's wife found this to be her stumbling block to accepting her husband's theory.

And I don't think it has been understood as meaning that, for example, the tiger is fitter than the rat. Rather that the weak, needy and ill suffer and die whilst the fit and strong live and get all the goodies. Hardly fits with the Christian pov, does it?

"The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high or lowly
And ordered their estate. "

Sadly, nearlythree is right only for a subset of Christians. The lines above are from one of the most popular children's hymns. For nearly all of their history the vast bulk of Christians have gone along with segregation of "inferior" people. Rarely was it as bad as it was to "subhuman" Jews in WWII, but blacks were commonly assumed to be slaves because of their god given inferiority.
Some of the attacks upon Darwinism were from the angle that it implied a commonality between "lesser" humans and superior races, which didn't fit with European christianity at all.
American christians were if anything worse, defending white superiority until well after WWII. They now mostly disown such laws, but it defies belief that you can murder or enslave a large % of your population if the overwhelming majority really believed it was sinful, or that the targets of this were really "human".