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“... as self-reliant, smart and funny. Just when you’ve had more than enough reflections on why Richard Dawkins is probably, unhelpfully, right, Mrs Barnes steps in with a put-down. As an adolescent I once hid a tape recorder under the table during dinner in an attempt to prove that, far from it being the ‘social event’ my mother decreed every ...”

“... wide philosophical interest. In clarifying the distinction between the selfish gene hypothesis of Richard Dawkins and the selfish DNA hypothesis of Francis Crick, he is led into an enlightening discussion of biological reductionism. The Darwinism of Dawkins is thoroughly reductionist, in the sense that bodies are ...”

“... with charm) is particularly striking. Johnston ticks off ‘undergraduate atheists’ like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who have doubtless noticed this correlation, and scolds them for their errors about Spinoza, but I find Dawkins and Hitchens (and Sam Harris) companionable, as I find Johnston ...”

“... This is an arresting, and frequently a very funny book. At times almost surreally virtuoso – Richard Dawkins on ice – it works a highly intelligent set of variations on the domestic and evolutionary question ‘Whey you from?’ Imlah’s first collection, with its startling answers, reinforces in yet another idiom the urgency of that ...”

“... the infallible cure for athlete’s foot: all reproduce when passed from one person to another. Richard Dawkins has called such reproducing ideas ‘memes’. Runciman’s insight has been to see that Darwinian ‘things’ can also be whatever occurs when an individual finds him or herself to be a member of a group. What then occurs are ‘social ...”

“... dreadful, to be the logic of all this, and recent television performances by Nick Humphreys and Richard Dawkins confirm this. Aren’t we all tired of these reiterations of sauve qui peut or, at its worst, that we don’t have it in us to love other people’s children? I’m sure there is a vast constituency of exhaustion out there, which feels it has ...”

“... at any level from the molecular to the cellular to the entire organism and its behaviour. Richard Dawkins extended its definition by asserting that the dam a beaver builds is part of its phenotype.) Epigenetics seeks to explain how, starting from an identical set of genes, the contingencies of development can lead to different outcomes. To ...”

“... hauls himself up over the final overhang – and collapses into a company of picnickers. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris motored up to his chosen summit a while ago; and here, sure enough, stepping forward to pat the newcomer on the back and welcome him along, who should it be but Philip ...”

“... between the experience of seeing something and earlier English poetry. It has a tincture of Richard Crashaw’s Counter-Reformation gory godliness; a flavour of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the way it risks going too far with the alliterating ‘bleb’ and ‘blood’; and the echt Hill quality of making it appear that just seeing something can hurt. The ...”

“... and quickly took root in the public imagination. But it also set some eyes rolling. Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould were critical, and scientists across the board argued that Gaia smacked of teleology or even new-age mysticism. Can we really say a planet is an organism? What if life just evolves and there’s nothing that actually ...”

“... head, which is empirically false. On the other hand, it only re-creates the same difficulty when Richard Dawkins goes to the other extreme and, having dismissed Wynne-Edwards more or less out of hand in favour of genes as the units of natural selection, identifies the unit of social selection as any item of cultural transmission capable of ...”

“... it can’t. Hence the current perplexity. History might reasonably credit Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin as the first to notice that something may be seriously wrong in this part of the wood. Their 1979 paper, ‘The Spandrels of S. Marco and The Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme’, ignited an argument about the ...”

“... new wave of furious proselytising for atheism (which includes not just Hitchens but people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) is just another surrogate religion is a familiar one. It’s what the God-botherers always say about the God-bashers. But in the case of Christopher Hitchens it’s not entirely convincing. The ...”

“... close nor unbridgeably wide. That we are vestigially an interbreeding ring species reminds Richard Dawkins in these pages of that song: ‘I’ve danced with a man, who’s danced with a girl, who’s danced with the Prince of Wales.’ That we happen not to interbreed with our co-survivors is because a synchronic species barrier has ...”

“... We talk about voices, beards and great moon-faced Welsh actors. He has been to the Galápagos with Richard Dawkins. I almost ask, why? He says if Shakespeare had been born on a beach we would never have had the plays. Well, we would have, but they would all be called things like Pleasure Hammock.I twist around and see Hope making friends with a ...”