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Holistic Guidance - A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love
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List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $10.17
Your Save: $ 4.78 ( 32% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Mariner Books
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 500
EAN: 9780618485390
ISBN: 0618485392
Label: Mariner Books
Manufacturer: Mariner Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: 2004-10-27
Publisher: Mariner Books
Studio: Mariner Books
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Editorial Reviews:
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The first collection of essays from renowned scientist and best-selling author Richard Dawkins is an enthusiastic declaration, a testament to the power of rigorous scientific examination to reveal the wonders of the world. In these essays Dawkins revisits the meme, the unit of cultural information that he named and wrote about in his groundbreaking work The Selfish Gene. Here also are moving tributes to friends and colleagues, including a eulogy for novelist Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; correspondence with the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould; and visits with the famed paleoanthropologists Richard and Maeve Leakey at their African wildlife preserve. The collection ends with a vivid note to Dawkins's ten-year-old daughter, reminding her to remain curious, to ask questions, and to live the examined life.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Imaginery Iceberg
Comment: In this book, in vivid and virile prose, and many passages of stunning beauty, Richard Dawkins has created an illusion of certainty on one of the most critical issues of contemporary society: What does it mean to be a human being. The book is a collection of articles written over several years, with a literary grace and gift for imagery that is almost poetry.
The book is not a scientific treatise, but it waves the flag of science on every page. The science is sound, the science is breathtaking, for Richard Dawkins is a superb evolutionary biologist. But he speaks from the pulpit of Ethology, yet ventures into the domain of Anthropology.
Ethology studies animal behavior and yet he applies the principles and findings of Ethology to human beings, for one salient reason: he is convinced that human beings are nothing more than refined animals, and this collection of essays tries to illlustrate this from the findings of the fathers of Ethology: Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz.
"To speak of animal is one thing, to speak of the human animal is quite another" - This was not a principle accepted by Tinbergen, and in Tinbergen's latter years, Richard Dawkins was his pupil. Instead of comparing human behavior and animal behavior, they applied their findings in animal behavior to human beings and came up with scientific monstrosities in human psychology and behavior, creating a pseudo-science, not recognizing that human beings have free-will which determines most human behavior. Of course,Richard Dawkins denies free-will in human beings. All human behavior is determined by genes, DNA and the mechanisms of Natural Selection, Descent with Modification and the Survival of the Fittest. His evolutionary science is sound, his use of it is off the charts. His claim that everything is biology has become almost an obsession and it determines almost everything he writes. Beware the man of one idea.
He breaks the primary rule of reasoned thinking: Never Deny: Seldom Affirm: Always distinguish. His inability to distinguish puts him in the circus tent of P. T. Barnum, with his exotic hoaxes. "A Devil's Chaplain" is full of literary and scientific hoaxes, but to call it science, and to give it credence, is to be hoodwinked into believing things like the Cardiff Monster and Piltdown Man.
It is a tragedy that such a brilliant scientist like Richard Dawkins would use his science and his scientific gifts to build a platform for atheism. The brilliantly written essays of "A Devil's Chaplain" is a clever use of evolutionary science to support a personal agenda that has nothing to do with science. Sooner or later someone will recognize that the emperor has no clothes.
Father Clifford Stevens
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Summary: Always something more to learn
Comment: This is a book to sit and read. You are going to reflect why the evolutionary understanding is great!!!
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Summary: Dawkins addresses some myths
Comment: Some excellent essays. A touch too close to being a bit racist here and there, but perhaps that was inaccuracy of language. For the first time I think I actually understand something about evolution. His point about the 98% figure of genetic similarity with chimps was well made. He cited the fact that if you compare two books, there will be a lot of common letters and the figure would suggest similarity. But if you were to compare them sentence by sentence, they would probably share only a tiny fraction of commonality.
What I still don't understand about theorists on evolution is how they still discuss superiority or desirability for breeding in terms of strength, speed, size etc. After many hundreds of thousands of years during which human cooperation in agriculture, shared civilisation and eventually technological change has transformed the success rate of the species, why are qualities of cooperation, constancy or intellect now not also included in the factors that influence natural selection? Perhaps they are. Maybe I should read late Darwin.
The idea that atheists just go one God further was also a point well made. Many of us would admit to being atheists when it comes to Mithras, Zeus, Thor, etc etc. Of all the Gods, most people who claim not to be atheists probably only admit a belief in one and thus reject thousands of other. It's a bit like claiming to be a vegetarian on the grounds that you don't eat duck, but do eat all the rest of the animal world.
The point about cloning and identical twins was made a few too many times, I think, but then it was a collection of essays. It is a point, however, that the non-scientist would find it hard to relate to, since for someone from that starting position the twins are "natural" and the "clone" is not, despite the fact that genetically they represent identical concepts. The position would be really interesting, however, if the twins, or triplets or quads etc arose as a result of in vitro fertilisation and then implantation, and hence were not "natural".
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Summary: Nobody does it better, but . . .
Comment: Richard Dawkins is more eloquent in explaining biology and more forthright in disparaging its critics than anyone else writing in English today. However, the Greeks said even Homer nods, and I want to pursue a thread in this collection of reviews, prefaces and articles where I think Dawkins does not follow his own argument.
A recurrent proposition in these essays is that humans evolved in Africa (even Dawkins haters could be charmed by his essays on his return to Kenya) to meet African conditions. Surprisingly, he does not then inquire: How does it come about that a genetic armamentarium designed for camping on the plains of Africa produced a species capable of both inventing absurd religions and working out, through direct observation and indirect, abstract arguments, what stars are? What possible selective value could having a brain capable of either have to a caveman?
The answer, of course, is that the mental function evolved for reasons unrelated to stars or spooks but once evolved proved to have other capacities. In medicine, it is not uncommon for physicians to discover that a drug selected for one organ or syndrome has a completely unexpected, positive effect on some other organ or syndrome. (And, of course, it is even more common for it to have an unexpected, negative effect elsewhere.)
The significance of this is that it opens the door to a special status for humans. Dawkins does not want to concede this, claiming, for example, that if we were aware of the continuous genetic gradient between us and chimpanzees, we would not countenance any fundamental difference between us and, therefore, would not `sacrifice' chimps in medical experiments.
This is very strange proposition for a professional zoologist to be making. What are species for?
The genetic continuity is present, obviously, and, as Dawkins himself sometimes says, goes right back to an ur-organism. So, where does the quantitative difference become qualitative? If it is unthinkable to torture chimpanzees (or, to put it positively, as Dawkins does, if it should be thinkable to imagine interbreeding with them), why not object to eradicating mosquitoes that carry the malaria plasmodium that kills a half a million African babies each year (or maybe a million, who's counting?).
One barrier is to claim for humans a soul. This is nonsense. No one has ever seen such a thing. But another barrier is the capability of being moral actors, and everybody has observed that.
It is not obvious that moral action has selective advantages for inclusive fitness. Dawkins himself worries that having too many babies risks famine. Indiscriminate breeding, without worrying about moral consequences, is likely to leave more descendants, at least in the nearest subsequent generations, than discriminate, morally driven breeding -- or non-breeding, as the case may be.
Surely the evolution of a trait that confers voluntary selective unfitness on a species makes that species qualitatively different from all other species that cannot do it?
I expect this deviationism is a result of Dawkins's desire to see certain outcomes. Very natural it is, too, but it needs to be struggled against. Evolution up to us was non-deterministic. We should keep it that way.
Otherwise, this is a marvelous book.
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Summary: Dawkins revealed
Comment: It's pity about the title: the subtitle is slightly more informative. Dawkins defines the book himself in the first sentence of his introduction: " ... a personal selection from among all the articles, tirades and reflections, book reviews and forewords, tributes and eulogies that I have published (or in some cases not published) over 25 years." This would be a better title but it's a bit long.
If you want to learn more about the things Dawkins writes about, this book is not the best book to read. If you want to learn about genetics or evolution or the God Delusion, this is just an appetiser. But it's a good book to read if you want to get to know Dawkins and his way of thinking.
It's a well-chosen anthology of 32 of Dawkins' "minor works", grouped in seven sections, each with a common theme and an explanatory introduction. Dawkins is a prolific writer, and sometimes he must write in a hurry: you get the impression that in his "tirades" he is using a dictating machine while waving his arms about. But the same passion that makes him do this can, a few pages further on, emerge as language so carefully and economically crafted that it will make you cry or laugh out loud, as probably intended. And make you think, too.
You don't have to read this book in page order. It's a good book to dip into. The memo for Tony Blair is a gem; every politician should be given briefs like this and made to read them. The eulogies are both moving and funny. The book reviews will make you want the books. The last essay is a letter Dawkins wrote to his daughter: it's personal and revealing and rather sad; I suspect the letter wouldn't have worked; he doesn't say. (I'm older than Dawkins and have had more children.) Look for the other personal bits, the anecdotes scattered through these writings: for each anecdote, you get one insight.
This is a great book for an atheist to own and lend.
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