Dawkins/Darwin

DeVore

I've been a big fan of Dawkins books but I've not found anything more like them out there... nor have I been able to find much on the current thinking on this topic (dawkins IS getting a bit old now)

Anyone else seen anything on this sort of thing?

DeV.

DadaKopf

Hehehe, are you a member of the Richard Dawkins fan club, too? There's not many of us! He's a little old skool these days but you can catch him occasionally handing out the grand prize in university Challenge.

Anyway, yeah, DeVore, there's plenty of stuff out there, neo-Darwinism and whatnot.

The other titan out there is Daniel C. Dennet - he's very much into neo-Darwinist theories about consciousness and has about 500 examples of everything to prove each point. His big book is called Consciousness Explained.

Dawkins' big new thing, of course, is Memetics - it's fascinating but he reckons some people are giving it too much significance; what if you could alter people's ideas through memetic manipulation? So, you have people like Douglas Hofstadter and opponents like Edward Wilson.

If you're into conspiracy theory stuff, check out culture jamming; manipulation through memes etc - disinformation and so on. But if you're just into the biological, Darwinist end of it all, Dennet is yer man. If you're into the philosophy end of consciousness, try William James (brother of Henry), John Hume, Edmund Husserl and stuff like that. But then you might like to read people like Timothy Leary and his contemporaries - Metaprogramming and all that.

Anyway, hope that was some kind of help .

DadaKopf

Hehe, Dennet even looks like Darwin! I don't think Dawkins is smug or arrogant in an egotistical way at all, he's just very confident of science - intellectual hubris and all that. He's just arrogant in the sense that science itself is rather arrogant - it claims to have an answer for everything and when it doesn't, it calls it irrelevant.

I dunno, Dawkins is cool - like a real life Monty Burns.

anichon

If you like dawkins, you'll probably like
anything by Carl Sagan too.

while he talks about cosmology/astrophysics
instead of biology he's a good read and very interesting.

Manach

Never been a fan of Dawkins and know of him from various magazine articles penned by him. I found him to be too smug and in-your-face regarding his theories.
My choice of an evolutionary thinker would be Stephen J. Gould (of punctuated evolution fame). Still as smug as Dawkins but hides it better and tends to look at science's progress as a whole.
I agree with Dadakopf on Dennet, found him, a good read.

Ri-ra

I'm curious to know why some of you think Dawkins is "old school." What (exactly) makes you think of his stuff that way?