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title = "A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love"
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date = 2019-07-16
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updated = 2021-02-12
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[taxonomies]
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tags = ["books", "reviews", "richard dawkins", "history", "biography",
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"stars:2", "published:2003"]
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[Goodreads summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61536.A_Devil_s_Chaplain):
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Richard Dawkins's essays are an enthusiastic testament to the power of
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rigorous, scientific examination, and they span many different corners of his
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personal and professional life. He revisits the meme, the unit of cultural
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information that he named and wrote about in his groundbreaking work The
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Selfish Gene. He makes moving tributes to friends and colleagues, including a
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eulogy for novelist Douglas Adams; he shares correspondence with the
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evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould; and he visits with the famed
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paleoanthropologists Richard and Maeve Leakey at their African wildlife
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preserve. He concludes the essays with a vivid note to his ten-year-old
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daughter, reminding her to remain curious, to ask questions, and to live the
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examined life.
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{{ stars(stars=2) }}
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A better name for this book would be "Dawkins, by Dawkins". It's a collection
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of articles written by Dawkins, selected by Dawkins himself.
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The first thing I noticed is that, for a "smart" person, Dawkins surely can't
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write. It seems he tries to shove so much stuff in an article that, at some
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later point, you start asking yourself what the heck was the point he was
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trying to make to start with.
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The other thing I noticed is how much he likes to quote other people. The very
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first article is so full of quotes, it feels like more than half of it is
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simply quotes. And absolutely a sloppy job in stitching them together.
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On top of that, there is a constant feeling that Dawkins believes he's
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"Neo-Darwinian Prime": The only person capable of talking about new Darwinian
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theories, and calling other theories wrong. I have the feeling that, in the
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foreword for a Stephen Gould book, Dawkins claimed the book was wrong. But,
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then again, with the mess Dawkins do with its ideas, I'm not actually sure if
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it was a review or a foreword.
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And even if, through this book, Dawkins claims that he has a good relationship
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with Gould, the fact that he keeps claiming he believes Gould theories are
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wrong, and that general feeling that he's the only one that can claim to be
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neo Darwinian makes me believe that he, actually, didn't.
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In general, I'm not even sure if this book gives a good impression of Dawkins.
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