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