Richard Dawkins is an Idiot

I think Dawkins is an idiot. But then in his defense we have to admit that every one of us is an idiot in the same sense that I judge him to be an idiot in this piece. 

Here I am not using the clinical definition of an idiot as a person with profound intellectual disability broadly characterized by a mental age below three years and an intelligence quotient (IQ) under 25. Compared to us unwashed masses, Dawkins is an intellectual giant who has made significant contributions in his domain of biology. He has also affected popular culture. He coined the word “meme” half a century ago in his first best-seller “The Selfish Gene”! You don’t get more hard-core than that.

In this case of Dawkins, I am using the term idiot colloquially which means someone who appears to lack basic common sense.

We are all idiots in practically every domain that falls outside our narrow specializations. Dawkins is a genius in his domain of evolutionary biology, where I would at best be generously judged as an idiot. Einstein was a genius scientist but in economics, he was a certifiable retard. I know more economics truths than Einstein did even though I am an unknown economist and he was the greatest of all modern scientists. He was a physics giant but an economics dwarf. 

If you want to understand how the world of humans works, I suggest you read Hayek and Mises and Friedman, but if you wish to know how the world of atoms and the fundamental forces (of gravity, electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces) work, read Dirac and Bohr and Einstein, et al. Choose your experts wisely.

Physicists should stick to professing on matters physics, economists on economics, and biologists on biology, and so on. That is what specialization and division of labor is all about. Don’t ask your plumber to give you stock market advice and don’t rely on your stockbroker to fix the plumbing.

Ask Einstein about relativity. For matters that relate to the world economy, don’t bother Einstein. Don’t ask Dawkins about the problem of “global warming” — he is not qualified. He’s not qualified not because he is stupid but because he has devoted his life to understanding genes and evolution and other important principles of biology, and therefore could not have had the training to learn the basics of economics.

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I admire Dawkins enormously. He is a lovely person, a gentleman and a scholar. I am delighted that he was associated with my alma mater, UC Berkeley, as a faculty member for a couple of years. As it happens, I once met him very briefly at a talk he gave at Berkeley in 1998; he signed my copy of The Selfish Gene.

I would rate Dawkins in the same class as Carl Sagan[1] as a science communicator and an educator. He is kind, gentle and thoughtful though outspoken in his position as a rationalist. Like Sagan, he has changed the minds of tens (if not hundreds) of millions of people. 

Dawkins recently concluded what he calls his last US and Canadian tour. This was also his opportunity to promote his latest book, “The Genetic Book of the Dead.” So far he has authored 26 books (and another 8 which he co-authored). Among those are “The God Delusion” (a full-faced attack against religion), “The Extended Phenotype” (which he considers to be his most original contribution; see this video.), “The Blind Watchmaker” (a detailed argument against creationism), “Climbing Mount Improbable”, etc.

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So what prompted this piece? In one of his talks during the North American tour he was asked about global warming. He said that he is worried about climate change that will destroy the environment in 100 years; it keeps him awake at night. That’s top grade idiotic. And disturbing.

Dawkins is enormously influential. He is regarded highly by scientists and non-scientists. Young people by the tens of millions know about his work and respect him. So when he appears to support the idea that climate change is an existential threat, that is what worries me. As it is, the young are already poisoned by that meme they encounter in social media and by idiot journalists. Dawkins should not have joined that bandwagon. 

Carl Sagan too was convinced that the world should do everything that it can to avert the threat of climate change. Why do so many brilliant people fall for the climate change nonsense? My guess is that because they are good people but are uninformed about some aspect of the world.

Einstein thought that economic inequality was such a bad thing that he recommended socialism. His heart was in the right place. His mistake was zero-sum thinking. The economy is not zero sum. 

So it is with Dawkins. He is mistaken. The world is not static. Even with positive and negative feedback loops, the changes in the natural world are gradual, relative to which technological changes are large and speeding up. Humans invent, innovate and adapt. 

The climate has always changed and will always change. Humans have adapted and are getting increasingly better at dealing with whatever the climate throws at us. 

Perhaps Dawkins should listen to a fellow scientist, the late Freeman Dyson. (Dyson too, by the way, was associated with UC Berkeley.) Just a few hours on youtube and Dawkins will be able to sleep soundly. The trouble with most people is that we are shallow in our understanding.

Alexander Pope in his 1709 poem, “An Essay on Criticism,” wrote:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

NOTES:

[1] Carl Sagan was associated with UC, Berkeley as a Miller Fellow in astronomy from 1960 to 1962. He worked on the physical conditions of planets and became interested in the possibility of life beyond Earth and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Berkeley provided him with a vibrant academic environment and access to leading scientists in various fields.