I find this a saddening thing to say: but all the evidence points to Dawkins being just another part of the crypto-Jew crowds taking the side of Jewish rubbish around the world. Read through the evidence; watch it pile up. There's nothing new about this situation, of course, though the pretence of science dates Dawkins to the recent few centuries, rather than the earlier pretence of innocence, backed by concealed collaborative force. At least he has some understanding of parasitism and of mutual academic back-patting.
Rae West 1 July 2018. Short note on the failures of Richard Dawkins. (His Appetite for Wonder gives his first names as Clinton Richard. His mother's name is given as Jean Mary Vyvyan Ladner; probably Jewish—it's easy to imagine Dawkins' mother as a part-educated simpleton feeding him stories about the 'Chosen People' and the horrors of the goyim, and leaving him mentally incapacitated, unable to say anything intelligent about Jews. I wonder if he was tempted to name 'Henry', his shrew, Moses?).
Dawkins's failures are in science (including mathematical models of race), and (collected together) failures in religion, history, morality.
Added 30 July 2018: Dawkins's family tree includes Sir Clinton Edward Dawkins, KCB (1859-1905). ‘He succeeded Alfred Milner as private secretary to Chancellor of the Exchequer George Goschen in 1889. He later served overseas as undersecretary for finance in Egypt from 1895 to 1899. His final role was as financial advisor to Lord Curzon, Governor-General of India in 1899. During 1899, he accepted an offer from the financier John Pierpont Morgan of full partnership in the London branch of his firm, J. S. Morgan & Co., where he remained until his death in 1905. He was a member of the Coefficients dining club of social reformers set up in 1902 by the Fabian campaigners Sidney and Beatrice Webb.’ Wikipedia. (The 'Coefficients' included H G Wells and Bertrand Russell.)
Many of Dawkins' ancestors were 'employed' by the Church of England.
• Dawkins is part of the crypto-Jew clique, plus secret assisting crowd, that is bringing the USA, Europe and Britain to ruin. Probably this is why Dawkins attacks churches, but never gives any indication of the true attitudes in the Jewish Talmud.
• And it explains why Dawkins never points out that one motive for membership of a church is simply financial and careerist. It seem clear enough that money can be a motive for joining organisations if they have money. Nobody funds the 'Flying Spaghetti Monster'; if someone did, no doubt they would soon have priests and hangers-on. But Dawkins will not say so.
Dawkins is just another phoney in the Anglo-Jewish crew of dishonest corruption.
Here at big-lies.org/jews/articles-on-jews.html#ja-dawkins is a more detailed account of the Failure of Dawkins.
Review of Jewish interest Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion Media lapdog, not Darwin's Rottweiler. Unsatisfactory!, 16 Nov 2010 Update - July 2023Readers an skimmers of Dawkins' book must have been puzzled by its oddly hollow-centred feel.How can it be that vast numbers of people, for thousands of years, were all, or apparently all, convinced by the idea of a single, omnipotent, invisible God? Why should so many people, in so many places, have accepted utter rubbish? What was going on—why did this happen? What was the trick? And of course the answer is simple: there's been a constant drum-beat, in modern terms a psy-op, by Jews. It's unsurprising that Dawkins doesn't mention this. His family tree shows a close relationship with Jews, for example around the First World War in which many whites died, but not many Jews. Europeans succumbed to this absurdity through the power of money: some of them were offered secure livings as priests, vicars, bishops, archbishops, 'Lords spiritual' and so on, for symbiotically supporting Jews in their Kahal and other exploitations. It's still true: in the USA many simple people say they believe in 'God' and 'God's chosen people'. Even people who've learned to see through Jewish pretences still believe in the Jewish God: a good example is Dr Lorraine Day. This is the piece missing from Richard Dawkins' book - Rae West
*** VERY LONG REVIEW! *** |
Review of Richard Dawkins An Appetite for Wonder—The Making of a Scientist (Autobiography part 1)
Dead-Heads, July 2, 2014 'Dead-heads' was a theatrical term 'applied to persons who receive something of value for which the taxpayer has to pay.' (Brewer's Phrase and Fable). Many generations of ancestors of Dawkins' paternal grandmother were Anglican vicars; another batch descended from an 18th century MP; another batch were 'doctors'. Many Dawkinses attended Balliol College, Oxford, and of course in the mid-19th century half of Oxbridge went into the Church of England, achieving, no doubt, nothing much, but receiving their 'living'. But by the early 20th century, many graduates went to the colonies: Dawkins' dad went to Burma. I wonder if he met Eric Blair, the future George Orwell? Their classical education was regarded by Hugh Trevor-Roper/Lord Dacre as perfectly adapted to their lives as military/ administrator types: I suppose Caesar's wars against Africans etc might be regarded in that light, despite the complete omission of the money side, the Jewish aspect being completely censored. In practice, the entire class was oblivious of financial strings and trammels. Anyway, Richard Dawkins was born in 1941 in Africa, and a lot of description about his very young days is reproduced in his book from his mother's diaries. Which incidentally include the claim she once darkened her skin with potassium permanganate for an act. This autobiography is published (in Britain) by Black Swan, 'an imprint of Transworld Publishers [which] publishes bestselling authors such as Bill Bryson, Sophie Kinsella, Kate Atkinson and Joanne Harris in paperback'. It carries his story up to 1976, the year of publication of The Selfish Gene. There's thus scope for one (or two) more volumes, perhaps coinciding with the 40th anniversary of The Selfish Gene. There are considerable difficulties with this book. On influences, Dawkins went to Oundle School, once famous for trying to combine practical and bookish skills. The odd thing here is that Sanderson Of Oundle, the once-famous headmaster, dead about 30 years when Dawkins started, was written about by H G Wells, himself a great populariser of biology, probably more famous then than Dawkins now. Wells' jointly-written and huge Science of Life in the 1930s must have been known to his parents. And yet there's no mention of Wells in Dawkins. Another of Dawkins' books has an absurdly mangled fake 'quotation' from Wells, so I suspect something odd happened in the editorial process of this book of Dawkins to remove Wells. The large number of not obviously important hymns, doggerel and poems (one's in Cornish dialect) support this impression, at least in my view. The book seems to be unbalanced, as though chunks have been taken out. I'll try to list problematical parts of the book. Despite the appearance of taking his family history seriously, Dawkins is featherweight on all serious issues. He has for example no feeling for e.g. the Napoleonic wars and impoverishment by Jews of much of England; or the opium wars and the impoverishment of much of China, for Jews; or of African history, such as it is. He thinks both world wars 'broke out'. Now I come to think of it, near the end of this book is a longish passage on Hitler and the odds of his not existing; Dawkins makes it clear he has a naïve Jew-friendly view of Hitler: it seems Dawkins has not the remotest idea about the world of the last few centuries. Whether this is him, or Black Swan's editorial people, is of course impossible to know. A passage in his book ('West Coast dreamtime') about Berkeley (he was there for two years or so) shows he had no idea of Jewish power in the USA, expanding after Kennedy's removal. When he returned to Britain he experimented with chicks pecking at grains. He tried various hypotheses related to 3-D vision, and other behavioural things with simple organisms, but doesn't seem to have discovered very much. He doesn't claim to, and the absence of claim seems reasonable. (Steven Rose experimented on newly-hatched chicks, probably at much the same time, inspecting their brains to see if there were identifiable differences based on one event). Dawkins' list of people at Oxford's zoology department makes, to me at least, agonising reading. There were about thirty of them, all no doubt well-paid, but instead of investigating immigration problems, or theorising on monopolists of paper money, or calculating in detail what beneficiaries of wars and atrocities got their hands on, they turned to nothingness, or at least very little. Probably there's an evolutionarily sound reason, in the short term, for evading realities remote to some individuals. Another issue of great importance to evolutionary theory is the issue of priority, between Darwin and Wallace. Obviously, if Wallace was the true initiator of the theory of evolution, their relative importance changes spectacularly. But the issue isn't even mentioned; Dawkins shows no sign of any awareness of it. Another non-mention is E. O. Wilson of 'Sociobiology' (1975 - just before 'The Selfish Gene'). There's a mention of the book's title. Possibly a different publisher handled that book? Possibly they disliked each other? Barely mentioned are two Jews, Steven Rose and Lewontin, both as far as I know Jewish race supremacists and part of modern lucrative science fraud. Dawkins' claim to be a scientist is, in fact, distinctly shaky. He mentions 'apoptosis' ('programmed call death') over which a big cloud of doubt has been cast by Harold Hillman. Ditto with supposed brain cell deaths. And with cell structure itself. Dawkins set out to study biochemistry, though without giving a reason for this choice: probably because the science of nutrition appeared to be firming up at the time. Luckily for him he was diverted into zoology. Dawkins makes great play of the desirability of scepticism, with examples from his youth of gullibility and its opposite. This is all very well and sounds honest enough, but he has little idea of the complexes of inter-related instincts and beliefs as in Islam, Judaism, and so on, arguably far more important than the simple Does God exist? material. Conceivably, this is related to what seems a simple view of 'survival': 'Natural selection can only blindly favour short-term gain, because every generation is automatically filled with the offspring of those individuals who did whatever it took, in the short term, to manufacture offspring more effectively than other individuals of their own generation.' This reminds me of people who think abundant children in one generation must be 'survivors' in comparison with less fecund groups: who knows what will happen 50 generations along, a fleabite in terms of the evolution of life? J Philippe Rushton on human parental involvement suggests it may not be so simple. Who knows what genetic limitations have developed over the vast accumulation of previous genes? —For example, why are there so few really lethal creatures? How is the murder/ cannibalism rate kept down? How come sexual reproduction with shuffling of genes developed at all? Dawkins was invited before publication to change his title from 'The Selfish Gene' to 'The Immortal Gene'. He kept his title, correctly I'd say, and it must have helped sell his book, and, by the way, introduce a lot of confusion, since obviously tiny parts of the reproduction mechanism can't individually be 'selfish'. One has to speculate whether he is something of a one-hit wonder, like 'Procul Harum' or, more appositely, Desmond Morris. Certainly his book has had some effect: I came across this typical nonsense in a mediocre probably Jewish-owned forum: Origin of Species was a great work for it's time, but it's probably not worth spending much time on it as it's so outdated. It works at the wrong abstraction. Natural selection works at the level of genes, not species. There's some interesting material on writing: arguably he's far more an author than a scientist. Just as vicars practised their oratorical skills with sermons which made a large impression but little sense, so Dawkins liked poetry. He claims to have a word-perfect memory for many poems. He post-dates the Latinate/classical styles and is at home with Edwardians - Housman, Swinburne, and I think his father's handwritten collection of poetic favourites, which included undergraduate stuff. Dawkins rewrote considerably - 'Pretty much every sentence I write is revised, fiddled with, re-ordered, crossed out, and reworked. I reread my work obsessively... Even as I type a sentence ... at least half the words are deleted and changed before the sentence ends. ...' Of course I'm aware that there are probably hundreds of millions of people who simply don't or won't understand evolution, which in outline seems simple enough. However, this situation isn't unique. There are just as many people with no grasp of science or history, and who think for example that blacks invented the modern world, that Jews were innocent victims of a mass murder, that men walked on the moon, that 9/11 was a Muslim atrocity, and that the USSR was 'socialist'. The common root of most of this is easy enough to find. However, the fact is that it's now 2014. There's no sign that Dawkins has absorbed, or criticised, work on the structure of genes—what they actually are, if it's known. There's nothing on genetic engineering. I just think Dawkins should have done very much better. [Postscript: I noticed what looks like a genuine posting online by Dawkins, suggesting Shakespeare, Schubert, Darwin and Einstein as pre-eminent names. As the Americans say, I rest my case.] [Another postscript: Browsing Hewlett Johnson's The Socialist Sixth of the World, on 'Anglo-Russian friendship' first published December 1939 (after Britain's and France's declarations of war on Germany) by a Jew, Victor Gollancz... I found this autobiographical note: '... A vital part of this training [in science and engineering, at Manchester] was the study of geology, in which my tutor was Professor Boyd Dawkins, friend of Richard Green, the historian, and a leading authority on primitive man. Dawkins, whose prize I won, was an enthusiastic disciple of Charles Darwin, and in a masterly way introduce us to the doctrines of evolution...'. Johnson (1874-1966), famous as the 'Red Dean of Canterbury', thus overlapped Professor Sir William Boyd Dawkins FRS, KBE (1837-1929). Why on earth didn't Dawkins mention him in his book? Surely they were related?] |
Review of Science: Evolution Richard Dawkins: River Out Of Eden: A Darwinian View Of Life Popularised version of 'The Selfish Gene' which doesn't quite work, January 15, 2012 1995 book—about 20 years after 'The Selfish Gene' and a few years after his Royal Institution Christmas lectures. It is, or was, one volume in the 'Science Masters' series, which is something like a roll-call of American 'skeptics'. There's certainly a need for public understanding of biology; it's arguable that Darwinism could be downplayed, rather than being centre stage. I've met people who said jaw-dropping imbecilic things—"I don't see cats turning into dogs" and "You won't make a monkey out of me!" and "modern medicine is [sc. all] dysgenic" and "children are [sc. always] better than their parents". Clearly such people are likely to go to great lengths not to read books like this one, and I feel a bit guilty at only giving three stars. However there are problems with this book, which in fact seems like an edited-down version of the Selfish Gene—many of the same names, often British evolutionary biologists, and R A Fisher, recur. Here are some weak points which I think many people would spot— [1] Dawkins insists on DNA as 'self-replicating', but this simply isn't true. It needs some sort of body or structure, and the two go together. On its own, DNA is nothing. How can DNA have begun, and how can it possibly have some code for an animal or plant or whatever? Apart from a quote about crystalline clays as a possible starter, this essential question isn't even looked at. [2] Dawkins is incomplete on sex. He recounts debates over sex ratios (does 1:1 make sense? What about elephant seals? What about bee males?) but never explains why sex might have evolved—very possibly because complicated DNA can develop mistakes, and if it does, it's useful to have a way of getting rid of them, which is what sexual reproduction can do. (Of course, it can also have the reverse effect). [2a] His sex material strikes me as being weak where he discusses beauty—e.g. male bird plumage which apparently appeals to the relevant female birds. If it is expensive in resource terms, why doesn't such behaviour just fade away? [3] There's a weakness in his comments on DNA and the 'African Eve'—an experimental result based on mitochondrial DNA of a sample of women from around the world. The idea was to try to identify the rate of DNA mutations in this supposedly unchanging DNA. (I'm skeptical of the accuracy of this work). Mitochondrial DNA is supposed to be pretty much unchanged and is carried in the female line only. The conclusion was that an ancestor of all living people was likely to have been African. However, there's a problem—if you went back in time and looked at the world's population as it was then, they too would have differing DNAs and might have come from somewhere else. Dawkins' very long account of this experimental material (which postdated 'The Selfish Gene') serves politically correct purposes but isn't sound science. [4] Dawkins isn't good on the total, Gaia-style experience of life. In practice, nutrition, food, water, energy have limits, and life largely spends its time eating other life and recycling the various elements- nitrogen, oxygen, minerals, whatever—indefinitely. This must impose some sort of restriction on life. The only nod Dawkins makes to this is to point out that exponential growth if it were possible would soon lead to the entire volume of the earth being taken up by bacteria in a few weeks (or something similar). [5] Another mild irritant is his emphasis on time, vast spans of time. But space is just as important—given vast acres of land, vast expanses of sea, there are simply more mutations possible. [6] Yet another doubt is the assumption about 'God's utility function'. (There's quite a bit of reference to the Biblical 'God' in this book—including the 'Eden' and 'Eve' references). In some cases, this makes sense—the cost of a war and the body count together can imply a killing was valued at such-and-such. But in complicated cases, this is conceptually difficult. Maybe the reader has spent his/her life trying to get a secure job; or avoiding learning Chinese; or never travelling in foreign countries; or leaving a home town; or getting an average amount of exercise. Any number of hypotheses can be invented. Dawkins says in effect you can see that DNA is maximised, and if God existed, that's what might be reasonably inferred. But how can anyone be sure DNA was 'maximised'? [7] The final chapter, describing a parallel between a supernova and the (possible) expansion of man through the universe, is obviously put in as a thrilling view of the possible future, just as the young Dawkins may have thrilled to the fake claims about moon landings. (With amusing naivete, Dawkins expresses no criticisms whatever about scientific fraud). Dawkins seems to assume space travel must be a technological adventure, as indeed it would be for us. But there's nothing in his self-replicating idea to rule out life in a very attenuated interstellar form. It's unlikely to be intelligent, though. His assumption other life must be wonderful is just an assumption. [8] As a technical issue, outside the scope of most readers, Dawkins accepts the existence of the endoplasmic reticulum and cisternae in mitochondria, neither of which (I'll be polite) are likely to exist. I'm afraid young people may be attracted into biology by books like this, only to find later in life that what they've been taught rests largely on sand, or indeed quicksand. |
Review of Evolutionary biology Richard Dawkins: Ancestor's Tale 'Meme pool' collected from Darwinian biologists and others (but pre-Darwinian social awareness), November 26, 2010 Very ambitious journey through the whole of evolution. It's in 39 sections, working backwards in time to about 2000 million years, and ending with 'eubacteria'. For completeness this obviously needs geography—the generally-accepted changes in the earth, including pangaea, laurasia, gondwanaland. It obviously also needs treatment of rocks and their changes, some of course (such as chalk) a by-product of life, some fossil-bearing. And oceanography. And climatology. Some is co-written by Dakwins' research assistant, Yan Wong. With impeccable anthropocentricity, the various life forms are introduced in 'concestor' sequence—the neologism means going back in time until a common ancestor has been (probably) identified. Thus the accounts start with human prehistory—early types of man, then monkeys, apes, chimps. Each chapter has its branched diagram of the type that's existed more or less since Darwin, with 'today' at the top and the past at the bottom, dated from when the 'concestor' is believed to have separated evolutionarily. It's a hugely-prolonged family tree: for example, a few hundred million years ago we have a shrew, named 'Henry' by Dawkins, an ancestor of every human being alive today. It's written, notionally, as a set of Canterbury Tales, though luckily each organism writes in modern English. 'The Host's Return'—a chapter near the end—is an interesting survey of devices which have evolved more than once. These are at the medium macro level, not the fine genetic detail—as an engineer might list the different types of engine, or different edged weapons, rather than things like split pins or capillary tubing. Thus hopping vs quadruped motion has evolved twice; eyes of assorted types about fifteen times, electrical weaponry, echo location, throwing and spitting, a claim to have evolved a wheel... [In addition to the impossibility of wheels evolving, it occurs to me that other engineering constructions could not evolve. Looking at a DIY greenhouse, in the process of being put together, with metal struts holding rectangular glass panels, I realised it doesn't have an internal skeleton. But it doesn't have an exoskeleton, in the ordinary biological sense. An exoskeleton of struts, with a fill-in surface, is not the same as a beetle (or other insect) skeleton. If I've got the vocabulary right, 'point-loaded structures' of engineers and architects, which need long, tough elements such as steel beams and (earlier) wood beams, could not have evolved. Then I considered other engineering or building techniques. Probably nuts and bolts could not have evolved, or nails. Biological adherences seem to be a matter of padding, elastic bindings, inserts which have grown in. Bricks and mortar seem unlikely to have evolved, though versions with blocks which could grow in size perhaps exist: in fact cells making up tissues and organs arguably are of that type, and unarguably have evolved.] Dawkins is good on etymology, evidently to ease the reader through the Latinate and Grecian neologisms. It's interesting to note the recapitulation of the history of science and of mores: British-derived names (Cambrian, Devonian..), Germanic material from the Jura mountains, the later US contributions—Pennsylvania and Mississippi, and now China, Japan, Australia. And conventions which used to include species named after aristocrats, now after humble taxonomists. Very likely there are Confucian interpretations ('neutral' genes? As opposed to fighting and dominant and recessive?) A novelty—to the non-professional biologist—is the inclusion of modern genetic information taken from DNA, including diagrams showing relatedness. He makes it clear DNA is unpunctuated code. He explains it as not like a blueprint, but a sort of process, something like origami. Omissions: the origins of life are more or less omitted (as are viruses). If life started in an soup of salts, carbon-chained molecules, acid ions, metal ions, and dissolved gas, and started to replicate, the beginnings must have been at the molecular level, something very difficult for us to imagine, as our senses are far too gross to easily picture these things. Surface tension, the electric fields around water molecules, growth by diffusion and osmosis in viscous liquids, gases dissolved by huge underwater pressures, enzymes, membranes a single molecule thick, shells a molecule thick, strengths of tiny structures, the formation of complex metal based compounds (e.g. haemoglobin, chlorophyll), the molecular building-up of ice and snow molecules with their mysteriously generated symmetries ... all this sort of thing is not in The Ancestor's Tale; I think maybe Dawkins designed his book with the remotest past at the end, partly to avoid the thorny problems of origins. Another omission is effects of physics at the D'Arcy Thompson macro level. Evolution recapitulating shapes (mammals returning to the sea evolving a fish shape; Bates on the Amazons finding a hummingbird the same shape as a hovering moth) for example I think are omitted. There's not much on human genetics—for example, those people unable to digest alcohol, though he does mention cow's milk intolerance as a discussion on people having perhaps been domesticated, like dogs from wolves. The sort of things medical people necessarily know about—horrible deformities and mistakes, including man-made ones as by Americans in in Vietnam—are mostly omitted (except in fruit flies). I have some negative comments, some of which will mean little to most people. In no particular order: (1) He says nothing about fake fossils, something of an industry in China now. Fakes have bedevilled evolutionary research. (2) The word 'syncitium' is misspelt also in the book as 'sincitium'—this type of structure (not the spelling!) is, or will turn out to be, important in relation to the brain. (3) Dawkins has a chapter on the coelacanth, a supposedly fossil deepwater fish, which unexpectedly turned up off the South African coast. It's a very short chapter, suggesting the idea that it was a precursor to mammals was dropped. (One of Dawkins' fellow Royal Institution lecturers said this fish was referred to as 'old four legs' by African blacks—an outrageous piece of nonsense). (5) There's a colour picture of an artist's impression of the supposed cell skeleton and endoplasmic reticulum, which are definitely phoney constructs. (6) Viruses are not included, which in fact in my view is sensible, as an awful lot of unsound nonsense—such as 'AIDS'—has grown up around them. (7) There's a misquotation from H G Wells' 'Anticipations'—basically the same one as in 'The God Illusion'—in which two parts have been swapped round, giving a false impression. (8) There are several pages on Colin Powell being called 'black' (this was before Obama!) and Dawkins thinks this says something about 'us' rather than the media. (9) The actual mechanics of dating rocks and fossils, and things relatively recently (carbon-14), is omitted, evading the considerable technical problems. (10) He assumes all the DNA material is correct, but in view of mistakes in modern biology there must be question marks over the techniques. (11) He gives no information on how 'similarity' between genomes is measured. For example the human genome may have been sequenced—Dawkins has a passage on whose exactly—but for chimps etc this has possibly not been done. Here's a problem: '.. we [he means people with DNA sequencing equipment] can measure the fraction that is associated with the regional groupings that we call [human] races. And it turns out to be a small percentage of the total: between 6 and 15 per cent depending on how you measure it...' This is surely a preposterous argument. Human beings have 46 chromosomes. 6 to 15% difference could mean up to 8 entire chromosomes being different! If that's negligible, I'm a Tasmanian Tiger. |
A reviewer said the book is 'primarily aimed at teenagers' (though the book itself seems not to say that) and there is praise for Dawkins on genes, statistics, tectonic plates, rainbows and so on. And indeed it does seemed aimed at young people. 'Things I never understood were made clear for the first time', says Philip Pullman. Whoever he is, or was.
But it doesn't matter what I think; the question is only whether the book appealed to young people, and perhaps had a serious beneficial impact on some of them. Every serious thinker must have had some influence from outside, after all. This is probably not a question answerable at present. However, my impression is that Dawkins made some effort to weed out pseudo-science and also, what is increasingly recognised, scientific frauds and hoaxes. He may have aimed his book at the next generations of scientific thinkers, not the vast numbers of Jew-promoted charlatans.
This book is of the same type as most scientific books from Victorian times to the present day. Dawkins looks at established science, and describes it; and this isn't as easy as it perhaps sounds. He has 12 chapters, the first and last being philosophical—the senses, and the necessity for one or more brains, and the invention and use of instruments such as telescopes. (Dawkins avoids the tricky ones: no electron microscopy, no mass spectrometry, no nuclear-magnetic resonance and its name-change, for example).
Chapter 12 looks at miracles, starting with Hume. And Chapter 11 is 'Why Do Bad Things Happen?' which partly looks at probability, though formal statistics isn't really present. The other ten look at the solar system&mdashdays, seasons, years—physical chemistry without that name, earthquakes, and of course biology and evolution.
Dawkins gives Darwin full priority over evolution; poor old Alfred Russel Wallace get no look-in. We have some speculation, e.g. on DNA, whether the universe holds other forms and types of vision, and whether other body types might exist. For 2010, I was pleased to see Dawkins has avoided major scientific frauds. Nothing special on CO2 or 'climate change'; nothing on NASA and the 'moon landing' fraud; nothing on superfluids; nothing much on nuclear weapons or power; nothing on relativity, though we have relative motion; nothing on 'AIDS'—of course this is far before 'COVID'; nothing on 'racism' though this must have been a strain. There are novelties: the biggest star used to be Betelgeuse, for example, supplanted by VY Canis Majoris.
I thought I'd detected two mistakes: marsh gas isn't methane, or at least includes phosphine for ignition. And (p 128) a football in a field, with a peppercorn 25 metres away representing the earth. This looked wrong to me, but it's OK. There's something else, so common I'm not sure it counts as a mistake, which is to assume that the senses are about the same. But after all there are great complexities in (say) vision and hearing and smells, and nerves and the brain; why shouldn't different people sense things differently? Red-green colour blindness being an important example. What's 'really true' even with what looks simple enough has a lot of wiggle room.
As with modern science works, there's nothing much on the downsides. What about weaponry, high explosives, and latent dangers—is it possible that the vast use of pesticides acting on the nervous system might induce long-term brain damage; of the 'mad cow disease' type?
And there's nothing much on science frauds, though Dawkins seemed to have weeded quite carefully, and nothing much on fakery, forgery, financial taking over of inventions, media lies, and other topics. These, in future, if science continues, must become a large topic. And the lessons will be projected back into the past. This needs judgment and genuine intelligence; Dawkins is somewhat like an advertiser who believes he's giving informational advertising. The other sort of advertising is suppressed.
Not for the first time I'm impressed by the difficulty of explaining many things. Take 'gravitation' for example. And the idea that a cannon shooting horizontally has a ball with a constant downward acceleration. Until Newton, this was missed by everyone and I simply don't believe the stories promoted typically by Jewish 'educators' that simple types can see it.
Dawkins evidently likes quoting mythical stories, and we have collections from (I presume—no bibliography) assorted historical and anthropological sources. They include stories of 'alien abduction' from the USA; Dawkins manages to be polite. He acknowledges more than thirty people, and seems to have tested his material on schoolchildren.
I'm half-inclined to think of this book as possible home-schooling text. This might explain Dawkins' caution about science frauds like the 'moon landings'. I'm reminded (from an online talk between Nick Griffin, once of the BNP, and Andrew Carrington Hitchcock) that Griffin said that Sweden had not liked lockdowns, because Swedish home-schoolers might teach intelligent revisionist material. Or at least that's what he hinted—Griffin's whole career was built on tantalising suggestions, not revealing all he knew. Obviously, US flyover state home-schooling would be silly Jewish stories.
Alfred Russel Wallace speculated about life after death and vaccination and economics. We may reasonably expect that psychology will be represented in future; children have to be exposed to some of the more fantastical experiments, I suppose. I hope future generations will be more switched on to historical evidence, including such things as the spreading of religions, the 'Holocaust', and the question of whether avoidance of lies is possible. Dawkins as yet is too amateur for anything like that.