"Richard Dawkins Stunned by Stupidity"

[Skwim]

Assuming Dawkins actually thinks his companion ("blue shirt" for lack of a real name) is stupid, what do you think Dawkins sees as "blue shirt's" stupidity? Or if not stupid, then "blue shirt's" major failing?

Or, isn't "blue shirt" stupid at all?



Update: Blue shirt"s name is Howard Conder, an ex-Jehovah's Witness and founder of Revelation TV (UK).

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[George-ananda]

I didn't view the whole thing after I got the gist. My thought is geez couldn't Dawkins have picked a more challenging opponent than a Genesis believer? My thought is that the more sophisticated 'design' proponents wouldn't make for such a slam dunk video.

 

[Valjean]

The stupidity, I'd think, would lie in the fact that the skeptic formed an opinion without researching the subject he was opining about.
Everything Dawkins explains should be common knowledge to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of evolution.
How can one graduate high school without knowing this? YouTube has hundreds of videos illustrating the various stages in the development of the eye. Did the skeptic not review any of these before forming an opinion? Did he habitually cut biology classes?

 

[Estro Felino]

I thought Dawkins was used to these "special" people...and still he looks mystified and surprised, any time he speaks with them. I thought that speaking with Wendy Wright had made him see what kind of people it deals with.
What reassures me is that Creationists' points are all the same, regardless of the country.
They all speak of the perfection of human organs, they all say "they didn't find the missing links. There is no evidence of genetic mutations"....so, you know what to expect.

I didn't view the whole thing after I got the gist. My thought is geez couldn't Dawkins have picked a more challenging opponent than a Genesis believer? My thought is that the more sophisticated 'design' proponents wouldn't make for such a slam dunk video.

The funny part starts at 5:36...but when the host said: "let me tell you what happened in my brain in that particular moment", I burst out laughing.

 

[Scuba Pete]

Or if not stupid,

I find your words absolutely disturbing. I'm not a creationist or a literalist and have never been, but I find the denigration of creationists by Dawkins to be nothing but intellectual arrogance and intolerance, bordering on bigotry. There is no superiority in belief or disbelief. Science has nothing to say about God or the supernatural and using it to debunk faith is like trying to use a spoon to disassemble a car engine.

As to the notion that the scriptures disagree with evolution, I completely disagree with the host.

 

[Windwalker]

There is no superiority in belief or disbelief. Science has nothing to say about God or the supernatural and using it to debunk faith is like trying to use a spoon to disassemble a car engine.

But there was nothing in that particular video where Dawkins was attempting to debunk faith using science. He was simply explaining the science. What you saw instead was the other way around. The host was using faith to debunk science. Where is the criticism of that?

 

[Kuzcotopia]

I find your words absolutely disturbing. I'm not a creationist or a literalist and have never been, but I find the denigration of creationists by Dawkins to be nothing but intellectual arrogance and intolerance, bordering on bigotry. There is no superiority in belief or disbelief. Science has nothing to say about God or the supernatural and using it to debunk faith is like trying to use a spoon to disassemble a car engine.

As to the notion that the scriptures disagree with evolution, I completely disagree with the host.

The intelligence of the host was an open question, and the goal of the OP was to determine if there was a specific failing of his reasoning that we could isolate.

I don't think we have to be so PC that we must put a moratorium on the word "stupid." It has a good use here.

Is "differently intellectual" a less offensive term?

 

[Kuzcotopia]

Assuming Dawkins actually thinks his companion ("blue shirt" for lack of a real name) is stupid, what do you think Dawkins sees as "blue shirt's" stupidity? Or if not stupid, then "blue shirt's" major failing?

Or, isn't "blue shirt" stupid at all?


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It must be not understanding the history of his own evidence, in this case, the Christian bible.

I think he could be forgiven for simply not understanding evolution. Many people who reject the concept for religious reasons only do so because they misunderstand it, as the host did.

But taking the bible at true, using it as evidence that trumps any kind of scientific explajantion, and then having no real knowledge of the history of its writing . . . is kind of unforgivable.

 

[savagewind]

The host was being stubborn imo.

 

[savagewind]

Does anyone know where I can find reliable information about evolution in reference to change before birthing and after?

In other words, for evolution to act as creator, it seems to me that, the organism must multiply after the DNA mutated. Is this correct?

Or, might someone argue that evolution has nothing to do with changes in the DNA?

 

[savagewind]

I suppose people have done the math and have concluded that all the mutations which were necessary for the life we are aware of could have happened in the many billions of years, and so on and so forth, but is procreation a factor in that equation? I think it has to be.

Do you understand the question?

 

[Scuba Pete]

The intelligence of the host was an open question

In what way? It's a fallacy to equate intelligence to belief or lack thereof. To be candid, I find it offensive and part and parcel of religious bigotry. No one is superior. Not the atheist for disbelieving or the theist for believing. To think lesser of either is just misguided bias.

 

[Windwalker]

In what way? It's a fallacy to equate intelligence to belief or lack thereof. To be candid, I find it offensive and part and parcel of religious bigotry. No one is superior. Not the atheist for disbelieving or the theist for believing. To think lesser of either is just misguided bias.

I agree that the host was not unintelligent. Scientifically ignorant, yes. But that is not a measure of one's capacities. The host uses reason just fine, but the system he is using is a prescientific one. Dawkins is trying to expose why science can actually explain these things, but to the host because it falls outside his prescientific system, it simply cannot register in his mind. He cannot see it, plain and simple. That's not because of intelligence, but because of the necessary contexts of thought and language that a scientific worldview can expose to someone.

As far as "better" goes, that's a bit of a relative valuation to a given context. In a prescientific reality, a mythological framework is "better" because it opens communication with all others who use the same frameworks of language to translate reality for themselves individually and collectively. However, in a scientific, Modern world, the rationalistic, scientific worldview is in fact "better" suited to allow the members of a society and culture to function more effectively.

Thus it is in fact "better" for the Modern context for the sake of quality of life and improvement. Understanding a germ causes illness, leads to more effective cures than an prescientific, mythological system which translate the same phenomenon as caused by 'vexing spirits" and the cure is an anointed cloth on the forehead blessed by the priest. In the context of a Modern world, science is in fact "better" to a particular end, which is deeper, wider, and higher knowledge. Therefore, I have no anxiety about using terms like "better". To say "better" is not at all the same as saying "stupid' or some other unnecessary pejorative.

So, in reality, the title of the Video where it errantly says Dawkins responses to "stupidity", is itself, a "stupid" understanding.

 

[savagewind]

http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/articles/mathint.html

Even among biologists, the idea that new organs, and thus higher categories, could develop gradually through tiny improvements has often been challenged. How could the "survival of the fittest" guide the development of new organs through their initial useless stages, during which they obviously present no selective advantage?

Whether at the microscopic or macroscopic level, major, complex, evolutionary advances, involving new features (as opposed to minor, quantitative changes such as an increase in the length of the giraffe's neck, or the darkening of the wings of a moth, which clearly could occur gradually) also involve the addition of many interrelated and interdependent pieces. These complex advances, like those made to computer programs, are not always "irreducibly complex"--sometimes there are intermediate useful stages. But just as major improvements to a computer program cannot be made 5 or 6 characters at a time, certainly no major evolutionary advance is reducible to a chain of tiny improvements, each small enough to be bridged by a single random mutation.

The biologist studies the details of natural history, and when he looks at the similarities between two species of butterflies, he is understandably reluctant to attribute the small differences to the supernatural. But the mathematician or physicist is likely to take the broader view. I imagine visiting the Earth when it was young and returning now to find highways with automobiles on them, airports with jet airplanes, and tall buildings full of complicated equipment, such as televisions, telephones and computers. Then I imagine the construction of a gigantic computer model which starts with the initial conditions on Earth 4 billion years ago and tries to simulate the effects that the four known forces of physics (the gravitational, electromagnetic and strong and weak nuclear forces) would have on every atom and every subatomic particle on our planet (perhaps using random number generators to model quantum uncertainties!). If we ran such a simulation out to the present day, would it predict that the basic forces of Nature would reorganize the basic particles of Nature into libraries full of encyclopedias, science texts and novels, nuclear power plants, aircraft carriers with supersonic jets parked on deck, and computers connected to laser printers, CRTs and keyboards? If we graphically displayed the positions of the atoms at the end of the simulation, would we find that cars and trucks had formed, or that supercomputers had arisen? Certainly we would not, and I do not believe that adding sunlight to the model would help much. Clearly something extremely improbable has happened here on our planet, with the origin and development of life, and especially with the development of human consciousness and creativity.

 

[savagewind]

I believe mutation for progress could have occurred. I will never believe that all the progressive mutations that would have had to occurred each at the right time were possible in only six billion years.

Maybe some people think six billion years is a long time. I don't see it as long enough. So I looked it up. This is what I found and I don't want to spend more time looking for something better. (I realize that things and time are different ) What I mean is that any mutation which occurred AFTER the organism reproduced would not count. All mutations would have had to occur before reproduction or during reproduction, which would be a feat in and of itself.

 

[Kuzcotopia]

I believe mutation for progress could have occurred. I will never believe that all the progressive mutations that would have had to occurred each at the right time were possible in only six billion years.

Maybe some people think six billion years is a long time. I don't see it as long enough. So I looked it up. This is what I found and I don't want to spend more time looking for something better. (I realize that things and time are different ) What I mean is that any mutation which occurred AFTER the organism reproduced would not count. All mutations would have had to occur before reproduction or during reproduction, which would be a feat in and of itself.

When humans direct breeding of animals (artificial selection or selective evolution), change happens extremely quickly. Check out the variety of dogs possible, over just a few thousand years. It's a flyspeck of time compared to a billion years.

The scope of evolution occurring naturally, by natural forces, is vast compared to this brief example.

Plus, I'd like to point out that these dog outcomes are not necessarily better or more advanced that their common ancestor, but that their evolution occurred because of specific pressures of dog breeders who selected desirable traits for reproduction.

Natural selection is the theory that the pressures of a harsh environment over a billion years is enough pressure to evolve complex life.

When I look at the dog chart, and how little time that took, it seem pretty legit to me.

 

[savagewind]

When humans direct breeding of animals (artificial selection or selective evolution), change happens extremely quickly. Check out the variety of dogs possible, over just a few thousand years. It's a flyspeck of time compared to a billion years.

View attachment 14236

The scope of evolution occurring naturally, by natural forces, is vast compared to this brief example.

Plus, I'd like to point out that these dog outcomes are not necessarily better or more advanced that their common ancestor, but that their evolution occurred because of specific pressures of dog breeders who selected desirable traits for reproduction.

Natural selection is the theory that the pressures of a harsh environment over a billion years is enough pressure to evolve complex life.

When I look at the dog chart, and how little time that took, it seem pretty legit to me.

Except that you are comparing apples to oranges. Animals and plants that are bred on purpose by human wisdom you are comparing with non-bred
species which came about sans wisdom, according to Dawkins.
Also the differences are not that great in your illustration.. Six billion years ago started with a molecule, not a breed of something.
The math is probably wrong, but I divided 6,000,000,000 by 5000 (the years humankind had a hand in selection) and I got 1,200,000. Not long at all.

 

[savagewind]

 

[savagewind]

How many of the 6,000,000,000 years did it take for the first living cell to appear?

And that cell needed a LOT of luck to divide. Don't you think?

 

[Kuzcotopia]

Except that you are comparing apples to oranges. Animals and plants that are bred on purpose by human wisdom you are comparing with non-bred
species which came about sans wisdom, according to Dawkins.
Also the differences are not that great in your illustration.. Six billion years ago started with a molecule, not a breed of something.
The math is probably wrong, but I divided 6,000,000,000 by 5000 (the years humankind had a hand in selection) and I got 1,200,000. Not long at all.

Could you explain your math a bit? I'm not sure I understand what you're doing ther.

Also, on human wisdom . . . One of our creations: