[westoncb]

> That is not what eugenics is

You are concluding that an accomplished scientist in evolutionary biology has a shallow understanding of evolution on the basis of a tiny linguistic sample, with an argument that hinges on the definition of one word which you each may just be using with different emphases.

It seems pretty obvious you have other reasons for wanting to discredit him than your estimate of his competence as a scientist. (On the remote chance this isn't the case: you would benefit immensely by re-considering the practicalities and limitations of informal natural language communication.)

I mean, what is more likely here: you have incorrectly deduced his incompetence from the basis of a single remark he made on twitter, or that his colleagues at top universities for decades have been continually imagining his competence?

[andrewla]

I'm sorry if I gave you the impression that this tweet alone is how I concluded anything about Dawkins. This tweet was just the most egregious example that I could find, and really made me reconsider whether my admiration of him as a scientist and spokesperson for evolutionary theory was well-placed. There are others [1], not to mention his various appearances on podcasts etc., and more long-form blog posts on his site where he reiterates these things (those are harder to dig up, and I'm too lazy to do so at the moment).

The site linked to in this article is an older example of his thought process, seen through the lens of interpretation, and is a very shallow view of some purported mechanics of evolution. Maybe just useful for illustrating some concepts without attempting to showcase the entirety of evolutionary theory, but worrying, because he never addresses the fundamental ideas of complexity and statistical dispersion of a population, at least in anything that I've seen.

I don't think he's incompetent, just that his understanding (or maybe, just his explanations, to be generous) of evolution are very shallow. Maybe he's just stopped thinking; relying more on his own beliefs and less on the path he took to arrive at them. Collecting rent on his position as a popularizer of evolutionary theory.

In terms of "other reasons", I'll try to address that. I align strongly with almost all of his publicly held beliefs -- I am an atheist, though less anti-religion[2], I am pro-evolution, though less mechanism-oriented. My conclusions have no motivation beyond a desire to assign some prior believe in his future statements.

[1] https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/531154466255667200, https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/111203295062165913... (this one is the worst), https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/313323444299251713

[2] https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/110833954764401049...

[westoncb]

Maybe all the information you're actually basing this stance on is through hours of listening to podcasts and reading long-form blog posts—but the only things you're citing as evidence are tweets, and the group of them suffers from the same problem I was initially pointing out:

They are all extremely politically charged except one, and completely insufficient for the purposes of judging his thinking as a scientist (no way to definitively tie his brief informal statements to some particular line of thought—there's enough ambiguity for a reader to read what they'd like into them).

So if a reader comes along and looks at the sources you've cited, all they walk away with is an impression of Dawkins' (implied) political alignment (in reality his comments probably have nothing to do with political thinking).

Maybe that's your intention, maybe not, but at the end of the day you have unambiguously:

1. Brought his competence into question (or "depth of understanding" if you prefer—though it's the same thing insofar as the effective execution of his work depends on having depth of understanding)

2. Cited as evidence for this: small, ambiguous, politically charged linguistic samples.

We have enough places in life and on the internet where arguments are made on that basis. Hacker News is a nice reprieve from it for the most part—which is my only reason for calling this out. I have no interest in Dawkins and haven't personally followed his work since Selfish Gene times, and I disagree with his anti-religion stuff too. But I also highly value having some place on the internet where the conversation doesn't have to center around who to dislike because they're on the wrong side of the discourse.