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Mindblind

Ian Hacking: Religion’s evolutionary origins, 21 October 2004

In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion 
by Scott Atran.
Oxford, 348 pp., £20.99, November 2002, 0 19 514930 0
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... in a frontal lobe of the brain. Atran attends more seriously to the idea of memes started by Richard Dawkins; started like a hare, perhaps, but still enjoying a fashion, if no longer in Dawkins’s hands (or even with his blessing). Atran thinks there are things going for the notion, and that it may find a place ...

Leave me alone

Terry Eagleton: Terry Eagleton joins the Yeomen, 30 April 2009

What Price Liberty? How Freedom Was Won and Is Being Lost 
by Ben Wilson.
Faber, 480 pp., £14.99, June 2009, 978 0 571 23594 0
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... group in a less than ideal light. Osama bin Laden is not likely to be persuaded by the likes of Richard Dawkins, and there are some reputable as well as discreditable reasons why he would not be. Moreover, if these are the only alternatives we have to choose between, we are most certainly in big trouble. Liberty and security, Wilson rightly points ...

The HPtFtU

Christopher Tayler: Francis Spufford, 6 October 2016

Golden Hill 
by Francis Spufford.
Faber, 344 pp., £16.99, May 2016, 978 0 571 22519 4
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... Plenty, 2010). He has also published Unapologetic (2012), an Anglican riposte to the likes of Richard Dawkins that’s subtitled ‘Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense.’ Backroom Boys is billed as a ‘love letter to quiet men in pullovers’, and Spufford often seems to focus on socially or technically ...

Why would Mother Nature bother?

Jerry Fodor, 6 March 2003

Freedom Evolves 
by Daniel Dennett.
Allen Lane, 347 pp., £20, February 2003, 0 7139 9339 1
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... do free agents get into a deterministic world? The gist of the story is familiar from Richard Dawkins, E.O. Wilson, earlier work of Dennett’s, and many other current sources. You can even read it in the New York Times, where Steven Pinker has recently urged teaching it to innocent children in grade school. O, brave new world! It’s a ...

Marketplace Atheism

Stephen Mulhall: The Soul Hypothesis, 11 September 2003

The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them 
by Owen Flanagan.
Basic Books, 384 pp., £13.50, August 2003, 0 465 02461 0
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... his warm words about the positive qualities of religious communal life (very welcome in the era of Richard Dawkins and his disciples), this suggests an utter lack of respect for religious believers. His criticisms are flawed – his response to the cosmological argument (which turns on the idea of God as First Cause) is compressed to the point of ...

Indomitable

Terry Eagleton: Marx and Hobsbawm, 3 March 2011

How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011 
by Eric Hobsbawm.
Little, Brown, 470 pp., £25, January 2011, 978 1 4087 0287 1
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... leading to a kind of papal absolutism, which some might see as a reasonable description of Richard Dawkins.) Hobsbawm, however, points out that Marx was actually too generous to the bourgeoisie, a fault of which he is not commonly accused. At the time of The Communist Manifesto, their economic achievements were a good deal more modest than he ...

How to Make a Mermaid

Adrian Woolfson: A theology of evolution, 5 February 2004

Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe 
by Simon Conway Morris.
Cambridge, 464 pp., £18.95, September 2003, 0 521 82704 3
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... perspective, biology and theories of evolution can accommodate theology, and the protestations of Richard Dawkins and others to the contrary are unnecessary. Why look for God in the entirely explicable workings of nature – the processes of evolution, the way haemoglobin works, the shape of a snowflake – when the real mystery is surely in the infinite ...

Not Entirely Like Me

Amit Chaudhuri: Midnight at Marble Arch, 4 October 2007

The Reluctant Fundamentalist 
by Mohsin Hamid.
Hamish Hamilton, 184 pp., £14.99, March 2007, 978 0 241 14365 0
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... and true – inside the coach had led him to open up with me, with such awkward results. Like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, I believe that there are certain statements and positions you just can’t agree with. Unlike them, though, I have a pathological inability to take extreme opinions or actions, including religious ones, at face ...

The Plot to Make Us Stupid

David Runciman, 22 February 1996

... independent moral judgments about one or other side of the coin. One does not have to agree with Richard Dawkins that Mystic Meg should be jailed for fraud to wonder whether she is really the person on whom the state should rely for the funding of the arts. One does not have to agree with Terry Dicks MP that the Royal Opera House should receive not a ...

A Duck Folded in Half

Armand Marie Leroi, 19 June 1997

Before the Backbone: Views on the Origins of the Vertebrates 
by Henry Gee.
Chapman and Hall, 346 pp., £35, August 1996, 0 412 48300 9
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... did not displace Transcendental Anatomy easily. At the British Museum (Natural History), Richard Owen promulgated a brilliant programme of comparative anatomy based on the idea that the similarities among animals derive from their correspondence to an ideal form – an Archetype built to a Divine Plan. For this, as well as his unattractive ...

Better to go to bed lonely than to wake up guilty

Tim Lewens: Self-Deception, 21 November 2013

Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others 
by Robert Trivers.
Penguin, 416 pp., £10.99, January 2014, 978 0 14 101991 8
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... that natural theologians would have mistaken as evidence for the creator; and it is the reason Richard Dawkins, while gleefully stamping all over the nonsense spouted by intelligent-design creationists, nevertheless spends much of his time marvelling at the cleverness of specific bits of natural engineering, even referring to natural selection as a ...

Intergalactic Jesus

Jerry Coyne: Darwinian Christians, 9 May 2002

Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? The Relationship between Science and Religion 
by Michael Ruse.
Cambridge, 242 pp., £16.95, December 2001, 0 521 63144 0
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... is probably the one that rests most heavily on potentially verifiable claims about reality. As Richard Dawkins observes, Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims. The same is true of many of the major doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. The Virgin birth, the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Resurrection ...

You win, I win

Philip Kitcher: Unselfish behaviour, 15 October 1998

Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behaviour 
by Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson.
Harvard, 400 pp., £18.50, May 1998, 0 674 93046 0
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... of biological altruism, they see group selection as what is really going on. In the Seventies, Richard Dawkins took a similarly hard line when claiming that natural selection is really a process in which ‘selfish genes’ struggle against one another. Later, he changed to a more relaxed view, suggesting that such processes could be fully represented ...

Cleaning up

Simon Schaffer, 1 July 1982

Explaining the Unexplained: Mysteries of the Paranormal 
by Hans Eysenck and Carl Sargent.
Weidenfeld, 192 pp., £9.95, April 1982, 0 297 78068 9
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Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts 
by R.C. Finucane.
Junction, 292 pp., £13.50, May 1982, 0 86245 043 8
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Hauntings and Apparitions 
by Andrew Mackenzie.
Heinemann, 240 pp., £8.50, June 1982, 0 434 44051 5
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Beyond the Body: An Investigation of Out-of-the-Body Experiences 
by Susan Blackmore.
Heinemann, 270 pp., £8.50, June 1982, 0 434 07470 5
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... out a whole army of allies. Sociobiologists such as E.O. Wilson, Robert Ardrey, Desmond Morris or Richard Dawkins represent the more overtly reductionist end of this force. Eysenck is often ready to associate himself with such work: significantly, he often does so in precisely the publicist and popular contexts that Desmond Morris has recently exploited ...

Mothering

Peter Laslett, 6 August 1981

L’Amour en plus 
by Elisabeth Badinter.
Flammarion (Paris), 372 pp., £6.80, May 1980, 2 08 064279 0
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Mari et Femme dans la Société Paysanne 
by Martine Segalen.
Flammarion, 211 pp., £6.30, May 1980, 2 08 210957 7
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... and parental love are dictated by something called nature. Even those geneticists who, like Richard Dawkins, have taken to sociobiology with enthusiasm, admit that the principles of gene preservation make little sense in relation to human evolution. For human evolution is a cultural affair, and this means that it is the cultural record which has to ...

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