Richard Dawkins on E.O. Wilson’s “The Social Conquest of Earth”

Prospect Magazine “The descent of Edward Wilson”

First comment on this: what’s up with the ad hominem attacks on Wilson implying (not-so-subtly) that he is somehow slipping (look here for another example) in his old age? Given the massive departure that Dawkins has made from science in his writings on religion, he is the last one who should be suggesting that E.O. Wilson is not aging well as a scientist!

What I find so fascinating about Dawkins is that he just cannot get beyond his own metaphors. In his mind the gene is the fundamental replicator and it has only one potential vehicle: the individual organism. He pulls this fascinating reversal that goes something like this:

Seriously, that is what his argument amounts to. How do we convince the mainstream media that this man has no intellectual authority upon which to be speaking about these matters?

Oh, and is this a book review? There is almost nothing in here that tells me anything about E.O. Wilson’s book. I would suggest that Dawkins is in decline if I had any sense that he ever made sense on these issues. Dawkins is dogmatic, and dogma is — in the words of David Sloan Wilson — unbefitting to a scientist.