Men's Memes: Dawkins Vs Dyson

Friday, April 21, 2006

Dawkins Vs Dyson

Science journalist John Horgan has written a piece over at edge.org criticizing the Templeton foundation, an organization that awards prizes to those - including physicist Freeman Dyson - who have brought science and religion closer together.

Many scientists are annoyed about this, and see it as unnecessary meddling.

Predictably, Richard Dawkins is one of them. Dawkins, of course, is the biologist who wrote 'The Selfish Gene' in the 1970s - a great book, and one of the books that originally turned me on to evolutionary psychology. However, it seems to me that Dawkins has been a bit of a one trick pony, essentially making a career off the back of the Selfish Gene, yet never quite managing to re-ignite the fire of that book: each of his succeeding books have been more and more uninspired. Dyson (also English) in contrast, is one of science's true geniuses. It was said that at age 5 he calculated the number of atoms in the sun. During world war 2 he worked as a statistician for the RAF, and then in the 1950s he was a colleague of Albert Einstein and one of the brains behind America's project Orion: a nuclear powered spaceship that was planned to go to Mars and even Jupiter and the outer planets! That there were scientists working on a practical plan to take men to Mars and beyond in the pre-information-age '50s is astonishing. In recent years Dyson has had a flourishing second career as a writer of popular science books which are, in my view, far more fascinating and thought-provoking than the later Dawkins fare.

So, here we have two scientific archetypes. Dawkins sees the universe as being built upon pure chance. Life is nothing more than a thin layer of organic 'scum' on a not particularly remarkable planet. Even Humans are not that important in Dawkin's cosmology: our minds are not so much thinking machines, but repositories of 'memes', a pretentious quasi-intellectual word that claims many of our ideas are actually informational viruses (for a good critique of 'memes' see HERE). Dyson, in contrast, sees a universe which appears to be maximally interesting and ultimately he senses an intelligence behind it.

Maybe the Templeton foundation is a folly. For I can't imagine these two cosmologies of thought ever merging in the scientific community.

What is ultimately behind our universe? So many of the 'laws' of our universe seem delicately fine-tuned to allow life to exist. This can either be accounted for by intelligence, like that which we see in ourselves, or by the operation of a sort of meta-universe natural selection (there could be millions of universes, and we are just lucky enough to be in the life-friendly one, in fact its the only one we could be in).

Ultimately the choice between the two cannot be based on facts, but on one's personal inclinations.

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Turn of the tide: feminists begin to regret

Cosmopolitan (The women's magazine that urges women to use men for sex) Editor Lorraine Candy has a change of mind and now urges women not to have "Soul-less sex":

"We didn't feel ashamed about one-night stands...this, we thought, is what feminism is about."

70s feminist Fay Weldon now says:

"It is the fault of me and my like, who... got it wrong.

So were we wrong, we feminists, setting women free? The results have been devastating – greater than we ever imagined.

We steamed ahead, changing the world with too little caution, and I hope the future will forgive us.

The pendulum has swung too far over. But it may yet swing back again. Societies, thank God, tend to be self-righting."

"Once a man could look forward to starting a family and the dignity that came from being the provider. Forget it. At best as a man you're decorative, look after the kids and earn a bit sometimes; at worst you're a write-off. Women are elbowing the men out. The boys get anxious, the girls swagger. The male suicide rate goes up, female down. Twenty-eight per cent of us now live in single person households - a lonely and unnatural state - and most of the 28 per cent consist of young men. It is strange that it is left to a woman to suggest, in the normal nurturing way, that men start some kind of movement to promote their gender's status and self-esteem - call it masculinism, brotherism, machoism, what you want - and some mark of the success of the feminist movement, that it needs to be done."

60's feminist Doris Lessing now says:

"It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.

Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did."

An excerpt from an interview with Joan Rivers:

"She's not with the feminists when it comes to matters of the heart. For her, they're to blame for the current parlous state of our relationships, as depicted in these television Shows (Such as Sex in the city) and films. "I saw this coming. You cannot be equal to a man, you cannot make a man feel 'I don't need you' or 'I'll take my sex when I want it'. All these shows are so sad."

Camille Paglia :

"Women have been discouraged from genres such as sculpture that require studio training or expensive materials.

But in philosophy, mathematics, and poetry, the only materials are pen and paper.

Male conspiracy cannot explain ALL female failures.

I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant.

. . . Even now, with all vocations open, I marvel at the rarity of the woman driven by artistic or intellectual obsession, that self-mutilating derangement of social relationship which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species."