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If you don't know Dawkins yet and want to familiarize yourself with his opinions and attitudes, this is the best place to start. It is a broad collection of his usual subjects, treated here in shorter texts. You will meet a convinced neo-Darwinist, an aggressive atheist, a clear, witty and sometimes arrogant writer on mostly scientific issues, a lot of them leaking into general society matters, ethical questions, political assessments, and starting bases for anti-religious tirades (which are usually completely to the point and right). If you know him from his longer books, read this collection of essays anyway, it doesn't do any damage.
I found nothing really new in it (after reading the God Delusion, the Selfish Gene, the Blind Watchmaker, and Climbing Mount Improbable before), but I was happy to find this principal statement: he is a scientific Darwinist, but politically an anti-Darwinist. That needed to be clarified, although it should also be obvious (and although in this short version it looks like a slight on Darwin, which is not intended). He uses the good analogy of the medical researcher who as a scientist understands cancer, and as a practitioner fights it. Or in other words: things are not becoming right by wanting them to be so, or in reverse, they don't become wrong because you don't like them.
I can not follow him everywhere though. His comments on "speciecism", as an equivalent of racism, go too far for me. Maybe once the Jurassic Park Authority has reconstructed Lucy, I may change my mind on this, but I am not sure that I will live long enough to witness that.
- Hardcover: 263 pages
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (September 29, 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0618335404
- ISBN-13: 978-0618335404
- Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 1 x 9.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Average Customer Review: 78 customer reviews
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Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1,255,189 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2044 in Science & Religion
- #574 in Science Essays & Commentary (Books)
- #267 in Organic Evolution
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