| 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. |