Posts tagged Richard Dawkins

Video 177
Notes
Posted 4 months ago

jtotheizzoe:

ALERT! ALERT!

New Symphony of Science - The Greatest Show On Earth

It’s about evolution. It’s great, as is the whole series.

(by melodysheep)

Evolution’s my jam, yo.

via moloweez
Quote 517
Notes
Posted 9 months ago

There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. What is unusual about today’s Republican party is this: In any other party and in any other country, an individual may occasionally rise to the top in spite of being an uneducated ignoramus. In today’s Republican Party ‘in spite of’ is not the phrase we need. Ignorance and lack of education are positive qualifications, bordering on obligatory. Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like themselves over someone actually qualified for the job.

Any other organization — a big corporation, say, or a university, or a learned society - -when seeking a new leader, will go to immense trouble over the choice. The CVs of candidates and their portfolios of relevant experience are meticulously scrutinized, their publications are read by a learned committee, references are taken up and scrupulously discussed, the candidates are subjected to rigorous interviews and vetting procedures. Mistakes are still made, but not through lack of serious effort.

The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.

Attention Governor Perry: Evolution is a Fact - Richard Dawkins - Washington Post (via sirmitchell)

And I’ll add Dawkins’ next paragraph for good, vigorous measure:

A politician’s attitude to evolution is perhaps not directly important in itself. It can have unfortunate consequences on education and science policy but, compared to Perry’s and the Tea Party’s pronouncements on other topics such as economics, taxation, history and sexual politics, their ignorance of evolutionary science might be overlooked. Except that a politician’s attitude to evolution, however peripheral it might seem, is a surprisingly apposite litmus test of more general inadequacy. This is because unlike, say, string theory where scientific opinion is genuinely divided, there is about the fact of evolution no doubt at all. Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well. Evolution is not some recondite backwater of science, ignorance of which would be pardonable. It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Thanks to Darwin, we now understand why we are here and why we are the way we are. You cannot be ignorant of evolution and be a cultivated and adequate citizen of today.

(Source: michaelikesit)

via paymanbenz
Video 6
Notes
Posted 1 year ago
Text 12
Notes
Posted 1 year ago

“The universe does not owe you a sense of hope.”

It’s quotes like this which will keep Richard Dawkins from being fully understood or embraced by the general public and it’s quotes like this which make Richard Dawkins fucking awesome.

Photo
Posted 1 year ago
Americans might not realize that, in the UK, Doctor Who is such a fixture of the pop-culture that the prickly evolution expert Professor Richard Dawkins did a cameo as himself, as if he were a cosmologist, which is not even his field of study. (He was also a friend of Douglas Adams and married a Trillian, so you know he’s cool.) Zoom

Americans might not realize that, in the UK, Doctor Who is such a fixture of the pop-culture that the prickly evolution expert Professor Richard Dawkins did a cameo as himself, as if he were a cosmologist, which is not even his field of study. (He was also a friend of Douglas Adams and married a Trillian, so you know he’s cool.)