Richard Dawkins: Darwinian and anti-Darwinian

I am an inveterate foe of irrationality. As such, I think the "intelligent design" crowd is completely bonkers. Here's to the Pastafarians!

That said, if you're looking for opposition to creationist pseudo-science in the classroom, you would do well to avoid the well-known anti-religionist Richard Dawkins like the plague. Qua biologist, I have no quarrel with Dawkins. Philosophically, however, the man is a disaster. Here are two choice quotes from a recent Washington Post piece about the "intelligent design" controversy:

And evolutionary science has a great deal to say about ethics and morality, Dawkins said. Being "pro-life in debates on abortion or stem cell research always means pro-human life, for no sensibly articulated reason," he once wrote. The fact that humans think of themselves as altogether distinct from other animals--and the biblical notion that humans have dominion over other animals--is a sort of racism, Dawkins said. Evolution shows that fox hunters and bullfighters are tormenting their own distant cousins, which is why the biologist sends money to anti-bullfighting groups in Spain, and why he notes with pride that fox hunting was banned on the family farm. "The melancholy fact," Dawkins wrote in an essay called "Gaps in the Mind," "is that, at present, society's moral attitudes rest almost entirely on the . . . speciesist imperative."

and

"I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining how things are, but I am an even more passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics," said Dawkins, who comes close to describing himself as a pacifist. "Let us understand Darwinism so we can walk in the opposite direction when it comes to setting up society."

The whole thing is here. In case you want to save time, this supposed foe of irrationality's view of humanity can be summed up in two sentences:

Our possession of reason to the contrary notwithstanding, we're cousins of bulls and foxes and to think we're somehow "better" than them is to be speciesist. Evolution tells us the facts of human nature, but our society should be structured in direct opposition to those facts.

If this is the best that opponents of religion can come up with, "intelligent design" is the least of our problems.