Richard Dawkins, best known as the author of “The Selfish Gene” (1976) and “The God Delusion” (2006), is at the Atheist Alliance International Convention in Burbank to discuss his new book, “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution” (Free Press: 470 pp., $30), but he can’t get from one banquet hall to the next without someone asking to take a picture with him.
Modest and professorial, Dawkins is mobbed, celebrity-style, no matter which audience he tells there is no God. As for Mother Nature, he adds, she doesn’t care either — natural selection is not a good-natured process, but one that favors mutant efforts to get ahead. The evidence for evolution, he concludes, is irrefutable; all living things evolved from a common ancestor, so grow up and stop whining. There is no master plan. We (our genes, that is) are on our own.
Dawkins will be in Columbia, SC, on 12 October, 2009, speaking at 7:30 pm. [url=http://sites.google.com/site/pastafariansatusc/atheist-icon-to-talk-evolution-at-usc]Catch him if[/url] you can!
http://sites.google.com/site/pastafariansatusc/atheist-icon-to-talk-evolution-at-usc
Correction: that should be “13 October”, which is Tuesday.
Dawkin’s real problem is that, as to theology, he is incompetent, and the reason is that he is unable to handle the required abstractions. He is simply a very bright, very concrete thinker. For him to look at evolution and then move up the ladder of abstraction to grasp how it is integral to a master plan – this is quite beyond him, not will any instruction in this practice have an effect on him because his mind is completely closed. Larry