Philosophical Dead Ends: Richard Dawkins new book on evolution.

[Hume]

"I end with my own preferred way out of this philosophical dead end. The reductionist worldview is one firmly based on a traditional metaphysics, or ontology, that sees the world as composed of various kinds of things with their characteristic, sometimes essential or necessary, properties. But what biology, and I suspect even physics, is increasingly showing us is a world of process. An organism is not a thing with a fixed core of properties (e.g., the genome) but a process.

Philosophical Dead Ends | Los Angeles Review of Books

John Dupré reviews Richard Dawkins’s “The Genetic Book of the Dead” and Sara Imari Walker’s “Life as No One Knows It.”

lareviewofbooks.org

 

[Hume]

"The failure to understand this causal complexity also leads Dawkins to dismiss a perspective almost universally embraced by philosophers of biology interested in biological causation as well as by a growing number of theoretical biologists: multilevel selection.

 

[Cypress]

Dawkins might be a good zoologist, but I don't think he knows much about philosophy, physics, or theology.

Dawkins is a physical materialist who believes there is no ultimate meaning or purpose in anything, and we have to make our own meaning in life.

That's fine for someone who has the wherewithal to go to art museums, eat in fine restaurants, donate to the save the whales fund, vacation in the south of France, and dote on their wife and granddaughters.

That attitude is not helpful nor offer anything to people languishing in a North Korean labor camp, people living with crushing poverty, or people being held political prisoner in Putin's gulag.